It was hard to know where to look first upon entering the event space at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum on Oct. 2. Brightly colored huts festooned with decorations were lined up against one wall, across from a menagerie of reptiles and tiny animals periodically extracted from their cages by smiling high school students.

There were drones and handmade dolls, 3D printers whirring away building tiny monuments and Sphero robotic balls pulling handmade Roman chariots across a tabletop.

Milling about through all of these displays were more than 100 educators, students and tech ed experts from rural school districts in the region.

They had gathered for an event called Rolling Forward, which brought together Remake Learning’s Rural Schools Collaborative and IU1’s annual Innovation Showcase. This gathering was a chance for educators to share inspiration with one another — and for adults and students to discover the range of projects funded by Innovation Grants from IU1.

“I always love the Innovation Showcase and just how exciting it is to bring all of these people together to collaborate,” said Alyssa Moore, IU1 Curriculum Specialist and Remake Learning Rural Outreach Coordinator.

“The inspiration behind it was truly collaborative in nature,” Moore said. “Sarah D’Urzo (IU1 Coordinator for Innovation and Design) hosts the Innovation Showcase yearly, and as the Rural Outreach Coordinator, I have been looking for ways to continue to celebrate and uplift the innovation happening in the rural schools. It just seems like a natural fit for us to pair up and collaborate.”

The Innovation Showcase was designed to celebrate the success of projects funded by the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and the EQT Foundation, and let educators know about the grant program. Educators can apply for $5,000 grants for larger, integrated projects or for $2,000 grants to fund smaller-scale or early-stage innovation projects.

Now in its ninth year, the grant program is open to schools in Intermediate Unit 1 (Fayette, Greene, and Washington Counties), as well as Ohio’s Belmont County and parts of West Virginia.

Showcasing projects from the 2024-2025 school year at Rolling Forward “was just a really natural fit to uplift both programs,” D’Urzo said, “not only to showcase what the schools have been doing, but also what our partners are doing, and what the network as a whole is doing for schools in our region.”

In addition, she said, it was valuable to host Rolling Forward at the Trolley Museum, because the museum itself is an educational resource in the region that all schools should know about.

Showcase Highlights

Zoo in the Classroom: At Canon-McMillan School District, teacher Chelsea Geist brings second-graders to the high school to visit her CHS Zoology class, where they meet and learn about a range of creatures. In the process, her students learn to care for and teach about the various animals.

Geist also brings animals for visits to all grades in the district, including life skills classes. The zoo keeps growing; “We have well over 100 animals in my classroom,” Geist says.

At Rolling Forward, one of the high schoolers fearlessly extracted an enormous insect from a small tank: “These are Madagascar hissing cockroaches,” she explained. “They get their name because when they get scared, they’ll actually make a hissing sound. But it doesn’t come from their vocal chords, like you’d expect. They actually expel air really fast out of their abdomen.”

Solar-Powered Manufacturing: In the Marion County School District, STEAM teacher Jamie Knight teaches pre-K through fourth grade students aboard a solar-powered school bus that travels to the district’s 11 elementary school buildings. He attended Rolling Forward with his wife, high school math teacher Kaitlyn Knight, and the district’s middle school coordinator, Margie Suder.

Aboard the STEAM Bus, “we talk about solar power, and I incorporate literacy skills into all of my lessons about manufacturing.” A book called “Supply Jane Clears the Way,” is a resource to help students learn about manufacturing. Characters in the book are making “dragon food,” so Knight’s students are tasked with designing “dragon food bowls” that this fictional company could sell.

“They get real creative,” he said. “Sometimes they make them decorative. Sometimes they make them with multiple slots, so they can have different types of food or food and water. And then students get to 3D print those on the printers, working in groups of two to three.”

Meanwhile, Suder runs a STEAM Center that the district’s middle schools visit to use larger 3D printers. And at the high school level, Kaitlyn Knight leads her geometry students through a project designing and 3D printing tiny scale models of major monuments from around the world. They learn history, architecture, math and manufacturing in the process.

The Art of Building a Better Writer, at Bethlehem-Center Elementary: When art teacher Sherrie Rodriguez learned about IU1’s Innovation Grants, she knew she could partner with library teacher (and former first grade teacher) Kelly Orr to boost literacy and creative writing skills in their district.

“Our kids don’t like to write, because they think it’s always to a prompt. So we wanted to get that out of their minds,” Rodriguez said. “I wanted to show them that as creative as you are in art, you can be that creative with writing.”

These teachers start with pictures, rather than written prompts, and invite their third, fourth and fifth grade students to be as inventive as they wish. For the students, this work was about kids experiencing themselves as creative writers, not perfecting their grammar or spelling. They were welcome to make “mistakes galore,” Orr said. The students also created art, along with their writing.

At Rolling Forward, Orr and Rodriguez were glad to be sharing the art and stories their students had made and letting other IU1 districts see this work in person: “We would love to help anybody who has any questions. We’re all excited about it,” Rodriguez said.

STEM Innovation with Sphero Robotics: Happening at Trinity Area School District, this project teaches students to design chariots and then code Sphero balls to propel them. The students learn history as they choose whether to build Roman, Celtic, Mesopotamian or other kinds of chariots.

And they spend time iterating, learning perseverance along the way.

“They build their chariot, and then they have to code it to get through a maze that I have on the floor,” says Trinity Middle School STEM teacher Alexa Harris. “It’s a lot of trial and error,” as kids have to adjust their chariot design so that it can be pulled along with the weight of the coded Sphero ball.

“I think many kids now lack the mental toughness. They give up easily,” Harris says. “That the stick-to-it-iveness isn’t really there anymore.”

At the same time, “a lot of kids, as soon as they hear coding, they check out. They don’t want to do it.” This project has an entry point for everyone, whether they like hands-on making or high-tech coding.

“I tell them, don’t think of it as a coding class,” Harris says. “Think of it as a problem-solving class.”

Attendees also discovered much more, including two drone-related projects, powerful work happening at the LEGO Brick Club at Mt. Lebanon School District, a California Area School District project where students aim to make bees more resistant to environmental concerns, and many other displays including ed tech resources and partnerships with organizations in the region.


Innovations Showcased at Rolling Forward

Taking Flight: Expanding Drone Education for Future Professionals: Avella Area School District, Washington County PA
Bellaire Broadcast and Podcast Initiative: Bellaire High School, Belmont County OH
The Art of Building a Better Writer: Bethlehem-Center Elementary, Washington County PA
Bee the Change: Advancing Biology Education Through Queen Bee Rearing: California Area School District, Washington County PA
Zoo in the Classroom: Canon-McMillan School District, Washington County PA
Shaping the Future: Innovating with 3D Printing and Design, Greene County Career and Technology Center, Greene County PA
Reopening the Greenhouse: Joe Walker Elementary School/McGuffey School District, Washington County PA
Highway Safety Crash Cushions: Marion County Schools, Marion County WV
Solar Powered Manufacturing: Marion County Schools, Marion County WV
STEM Innovation through Sphero Robotics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Hands-On Learning: Trinity Area School District, Washington County PA
Up and Away With Drones!: South Middle School, Monongalia County, WV

All photos from Rolling Forward 2025 by Ben Filio for Remake Learning. This story was originally published at RemakeLearning.org.