NMT Master's Student Named STEM Teacher of the Year
March 26, 2018
Moriarty High School teacher Jaime Silva spells STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) a little differently than most.
The three M’s she puts in her math classes recently won her the STEM award as the NM STEM Teacher of the Year. Silva uses the video game EPIC Mario and M&Ms candy to relate to her students.
Pre-calculus students get to pick Mario characters and pick up coins or boxes as they progress, while in Algebra II, the M&Ms are used to teach exponents and graph the results when the candies are added and subtracted from cups.
“We use cross-curricular things like zombie apocalypses, crime scene investigations or circuits,” Silva said. “They make the class more engaging and more exciting, and ...