Paper Bridges and Teaching STEM

I'm teaching a new course this semester: Methods of Teaching STEM in K-12 Schools. This is not just a new course for me, but a new course for our program entirely, which brings some joys and challenges. I have 14 years of experience teaching in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) in K-12 schools, so I have ideas about what this looks like. But the truth is, we're thinking here about the intersections of these disciplines, which is what makes this course both fun and demanding.

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.