I have four students taking the course, and they are all in, which makes it fun. The thing is, they all have different backgrounds and different majors in education (various STEM-field interests) and that makes it a little demanding. But the flipside of that is that we have already had some really rich discussions, as they are bringing the habits and heuristics of their different disciplines to our work. The main thing I'm realizing is that we are all going to be learning together and from each other this semester, including me. I sincerely hope this is a good way of modeling "always learning, never arriving"--which has become one of my mantras for the way I think about my work as an educator.
One thing we're trying this semester: a series of design challenges. This is often where the STEM disciplines will come together in natural ways, I think, and not just for the future teachers I'm serving this semester. In my experience teaching integrative units as a middle school science teacher, I regularly collaborated with my colleague who taught math, and we would come up with projects that would demand students to use science concepts and math reasoning, leveraging technology, as they would engineer a solution to the project we proposed to them. I'm tapping into this spirit for the design challenges we're going to play with this semester.
And so, our first challenge began: the paper bridges.
I gave my students this prompt:
Use only one sheet of paper and 10 cm of Scotch tape to build a bridge that can support the weight of 100 pennies.
Yep, one sheet of regular printer paper. About 4 inches of Scotch tape. Holding up 100 pennies without collapsing.
And, of course, without some design constraints, it isn't really an engineering challenge. So, I gave them these constraints:
- Your bridge must span at least 20 cm (across an imaginary river, in a canyon created by some encyclopedias.)
- Your bridge must be at least 5 cm wide so our car can safely drive across it (Hot Wheels car on hand to check!)
- Your bridge must have a flat surface on top (so our Hot Wheels car can cross it.)
- Your bridge must be free-standing (no pillars underneath, so boats can travel our imaginary river beneath it.)
And, of course, since my students are all in to the work on this class, they designed some great stuff! A variety of different designs, actually, and every one held up well over 100 pennies of mass without crumpling.
 |
| One bridge, in the process of being tested. Easily held up those 100 pennies. |
It was a successful first design challenge for us. After we finished testing them, we did a little processing of the activity, thinking about the teaching implications for this kind of activity. I gave them a few initial prompting questions, including:
- How did you see the STEM disciplines involved in this activity?
- Is this “real” work? Does it need to be?
- What did you notice? What do you wonder? (This has become my favorite questioning protocol lately--it works for almost any instructional context!)
My students had a lot of great ideas about the activity, and how it could be adapted to all kinds of STEM teaching situations, from a middle school physical science class, to an industrial technology lesson on design principles and processes, to an introductory activity for a physics lesson on forces. There are probably lots more possibilities as well!
The big idea: getting students involved in active learning, problem solving, and drawing on the STEM disciplines in meaningful ways to meet the challenge. I was encouraged, and I'm planning to do more of these kinds of activities in coming weeks! We'll see what other creative ideas my students come up with as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment