About | Technitopics

My Story

Hello! I am Dr. Trudy Sherman. I have a passion for teaching technical topics in a way that makes them fun and easy to understand. My first opportunity to teach a technical topic came in high school when I was selected to teach an afterschool enrichment class for elementary students called "Math for Fun". I spent hours creating unique math games to teach and reinforce math concepts. I loved it and so did the students.

Ten years later I got the itch to teach again. I started volunteering at the Montessori school our children attended. In the beginning I helped the kids use the computers and understand how the computers worked. I created and taught a class called "Computer Guts" which included opening up computers to show how they are made and how they work. The topics I taught expanded to include magnetism, static electricity, current electricity, building radios and programming robots. When the school decided to participate in a Future Cities competition, my husband and I volunteered to lead and mentor the teams. I am happy to say that one of our teams made it to the state finals.

See Schedule

After 12 years of volunteering, all four of our kids had finished elementary school and were either off to college or in high school. I opened my company, Techni-Topics. I was contracted at charter schools to teach many of the same things I had taught at the Montessori school. The kids liked to call me "The Magnet Lady". It was while working at the charter schools that I decided some day I would make my lesson plans and activity kits available to teachers so that it would be easier for them to teach the technical topics of magnetism, electricity, physics, and matter.

Throughout the first 20+ years of following my passion to teach technical topics to young people, it was always done on the side and fit into cracks in my schedule of "real" work and home responsibilities. My formal education is in electrical engineering. As such, I started my career at Motorola as a digital design engineer designing and programming microprocessor-based systems. After 12 years I left Motorola to finish my Masters degree. Once the degree was done, I formed my own consulting company: Sherman Software Engineering. I have worked as an independent engineering consultant for over 30 years. During that time I also worked at Arizona State University part-time teaching engineering classes.

About 5 years ago our 2nd daughter became the director of a charter school. She was in need of a part-time science teacher and asked if I was interested. I decided working for her would be a great way to revitalize Techni-Topics. I would be able to finalize all of my lesson plans while working with real students. I taught 2nd through 5th graders at her school for 3 years. The time spent there was definitely worthwhile. The 4th grade science scores for the state testing were above average and the wrinkles in my lesson plans got ironed out..

So here we are in the present. I currently manage our dance studio, Kaleidoscope Dance Space (how we got there is a whole other story). I teach Gentle Tai Chi classes designed for Parkisnson's patients, 1-Wall Line Dance classes that don't turn or change direction, and ballroom classes for beginners and social dancers. One afternoon a week I teach Hands-on Science (STEM) classes and every few months I offer Science Make n Take workshops. So much fun!

If you live in the Phoenix area, I would love to see you at one or more of my classes and/or workshops.

No matter where you live, I hope you will give my lesson plans and activity kits a try.

It is my expectation that you will find my lesson plans easy to follow and fun to use and my activity kits a quick and affordable way to get exactly the materials you need to implement the lesson plans.