A Kilkenny head teacher has won Microsoft’s top award for innovation, after he used the novel Don Quixote to teach pupils about robotics, science and maths. Tommy Maher, the principal of Scoil Naomh Fiachra, in Co. Kilkenny has won an Innovative Teacher Award at Microsoft’s Worldwide Innovative Teachers Forum (ITF) 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. Now in its third year, the Innovative Teachers Forum is the culmination of a series of regional events designed to honour outstanding teachers.
Tommy’s project, Don Quixote: Impossible Dreamers, won the ‘Innovation in Content’ category. The Project name arose from the “Don Quixote” novel chosen for the pupils to study. The book was used to link ICT, robotics, science and mathematics in the school’s curriculum. When pupils came across the musical “Man of La Mancha” and were taken with the idea of Don Quixote dreaming the impossible dream.
When pupils began to try to animate Don Quixote with robots and to design a windmill that would lift Don off his horse, as happened in the novel, they began to see themselves as the “impossible dreamers”, giving Tommy the name for his project.
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