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STEM Workshop With My Kids School - Part 2 - The STEM Workshop

2019-04-12

Defining the STEM workshop A STEM workshop was offered by the school principal to the teachers from 3rd to 6th class. All 7 teachers subscribed.

6 workshops ran from March 1 to April 11 - with the 7th after the midterm break which is for my daughter's class. So I'll let her, and her friends, choose the activity.

(My son is in 2nd class but the STEM workshop was not available to him - though he really wanted to do it.)

See the full series of blogs on the STEM workshop:

  1. STEM Workshop With My Kids School - Part 1 - Before the STEM Workshop
  2. STEM Workshop With My Kids School - Part 2 - The STEM Workshop
  3. STEM Workshop With My Kids School - Part 3 - Where To From Here
  4. STEM Workshop With My Kids School - Part 4 - STEM Workshop Tweets

Criteria For Defining The Activity

  1. Fun and engaging for the students so they would get value from it
  2. A success with the school teachers and principal
  3. They would see what was possible and be encouraged to do more.
  4. Unique; I did not want to do STEM activities the school was already doing. It would not be coding. There are enough coding activities available outside school - and not every kid is into coding.
  5. Fit with materials and resources I had
  6. Student led; after an initial introduction on the theory, the kids would have to figure out how to build the circuits themselves (and I'd provide input if asked).
  7. Minimal dependencies on school equipment. The school has laptops for the students but I would have to familiarise myself with them and set them up as required so I avoided using them for this STEM workshop.

Curriculum Mapping

The activities primarily focus on 3rd to 6th class - Science - Energy and Forces per http://nccaplanning.ie/ NCCA Curriculum Planning Tool.

Content and questions were oriented around the Learning Outcomes defined there.

Materials And Resources

The longlist of possible activities was

Makeblock Neuron and Brixo were selected. I also used various robots I had including Qdee / microbit to demonstrate the different energy electronic components in action.

I purchased an extra battery power block for the Makeblock so 3 Makeblock Neuron activities could be done in parallel and 1 Brixo activity (each class would be divided into teams of 4).

Activity Design

I used the Teaching for Tomorrow Handbook 21st Century Learning in Action as the basis for the Lesson Plan and Activity Design template.

The lesson plan used for the workshops contains all the content from which I would use a subset for any given workshop.

The curriculum is here

  • Class runs from 9am to 10.20am (first break)
  • I introduce the topic of Energy by asking a series of questions for about 20 minutes
  • Class is split into 4 tables/teams
  • Each team chooses a fun team name with an energy theme e.g. "Energetic Eagles"
  • Activities are presented as an abstract statement requiring a solution e.g. “measure the amount of Red Green Blue in each coloured card” or “measure the height of the classroom ceiling”. Students must think about how they can apply the different energy sensors and converters to build the solutions.
  • The class does the first series of activities and each team does a demo to the rest of the class to explain what's happening - and takes questions from the rest of the class (30 minutes)
  • Then there's a second series of activities (30 minutes)
  • 5th and 6th classes build circuits and control them with code. The coding aspect would be drawn on the interactive board. Computers were not used.
  • 3rd, 4th classes just build circuits (and not code). This is based on a discussion with Keith Quille (http://keithquille.com) who advises NCCA on curriculum.

Criteria For A Successful class

  • It's fun for all - there's laughing, wows of surprise, and experimentation
  • The students contribute - by asking lots of questions, and providing their knowledge and experience e.g. "how Beluga whales use sound to navigate", "could you hear the sun if you were standing on it?".
  • All students are fully engaged
  • The teams give demos that show they understand what's happening
  • The students have a good understanding of energy principles and enjoyed the learning activity

Conclusion

Overall, I am very happy with how the classes went - students, teachers, and I enjoyed them. There were no technical bumps and all the activities worked successfully on the day. The content was completed within the 80 minutes allocated.

Preparing the content took a lot of effort at the start - with some classes being prepared the night before after I finished work.

I refined each class based on what went well and what didn't.

  • For the first few classes each team was given an A1 sheet to describe the activities and the results to be presented. I dropped this in later classes, as the writing of the activity details excluded those doing the writing from the activity. I think an optimal setup would be 2 people delivering the content to 8 teams of 3-4 students but I did not have the second set of materials or a second person to deliver except for one of the classes where one of the other STEM parents co-prepared and co-delivered with me. This was much more effective than one person.
  • I had originally planned to do a Retrospective at the end of the class to reflect on the activity but time did not permit so this was dropped. The Retrospective would be more meaningful if the class was doing a series of workshops instead of just one.

Based on the feedback, the teachers were impressed with what the students knew already and how well they performed the activities with the minimal instruction provided.

I am very grateful to the school; the principal and the teachers for making this happen!

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STEM Workshop With My Kids School - Part 1 - Before the STEM Workshop

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STEM Workshop With My Kids School - Part 3 - Where To From Here