Kindergarten Family STEAM Afternoon

Last term we had a wonderful open afternoon of STEAM for our Kindergarten families. Some of our Year 4, 5 and 6 mentors came along to help with some simple science, technology and engineering activities. It was great to see so many of our families having fun and learning together. Here are some highlights:

Test out the cars going down the pipe into the sandpit. How can you make the cars go faster? How can you make the cars go slower?

How tall can you make a balloon tower that can stand up without anyone holding it? The only things you can use are a piece of paper for the bottom, balloons and masking tape.

Can you design a lego marble maze?

Can you make a shape bubble wand using the materials provided? Which ones work best? A square, a circle, a triangle, or a star? I wonder why ...

Design challenges are fun for everyone!

Ozobots: Can you make a track for your robot to follow?
Can you make Ozobot do any special tricks?

GO Program Challenge: Design a Trap

A small group of Year 3 students have been working on a design challenge they were set as part of a gifted online program. 

The Scenario:

Imagine that an oil company has discovered a valuable oil deposit under where your animal lives. You have just two weeks to remove and save as many of your animal as possible. You don’t have many people though so it has been decided that trapping the animals and then going round and collecting them up for transport to a new area is the best way to go.

Your job is to design the trap using only materials from the list below (these materials are substituting for the timber, plastic etc. that you would have in real life). You need to make a trap that will operate without a person controlling it to capture but not injure your creature. The trap needs to be humane, it should contain the animal for up to 24 hours without damaging it in any way.

Your design must have at least two of the simple machines listed below as part of the structure:

¨ Pulley

¨ Lever

¨ Inclined plane

¨ Wheel

¨ Axel

They labelled their final design using Seesaw: 

First, I had the students research the animal they were going to design a trap for. Here is their information report:

Once the students had found out some background information on the animal they were going to design their trap for, I had them follow the engineering design process to complete their projects:

STEM+X Futurists' Fair

This week our Year 5/6 students had the opportunity to present some of their big ideas to a panel of judges for the STEM+X Futurists' Fair. It was so wonderful for them to have an authentic audience; what a positive message for them that their voices matter and that there are people willing to listen to and believe in their ideas. I hope that it will be an experience that stays with them throughout life. 

Each group has been working on different STEM solutions for how they would help to improve Australia's future. This is one of the group's ideas:

"We love STEM because we get to do hands-on learning and solve real problems. We get to do the thinking for ourselves and learn about things we are interested in and passionate about."

"We learn about things that might help us in the future. We learn skills that will help us no matter what type of job we want, like working together and thinking critically."

"Thank you ABCN and NBN Co. This program has helped us to realise that we can use STEM to help our world to be a better place. We have learnt that we CAN make a difference in our own lives and the lives of others. We have learnt how to work together and how to compromise when we all had different ideas. We have learnt to be curious and to ask the big questions."

"We have become better problem-solvers and it has helped us to have more resilience when things don’t go the way we originally planned. We have learnt that mistakes are all part of the design process. We have learnt that our ideas are awesome!"

Futurists' Fair - Week 3

How can we help to reduce the impact that humans have on the environment?

Students pitched their ideas for the "big picture" problem that they want to solve for the Futurists' Fair. They voted and the majority of students agreed that the impact that humans have on the environment (mainly pollution) was the issue they would address. This is the collaborative video that a small group of students created to explain what their problem is and why it is important.

We are using the 6 Ds of Design Thinking as a framework for their problem-solving. Once they had decided on the problem it was time to brainstorm potential STEM solutions to their problem. This is where we DREAM and start to imagine and brainstorm possible solutions. It's usually the stage my classroom starts getting loud; there's a buzz of ideas and excitement and they really start to collaborate and build on each other's ideas. This is probably the part that is the most rewarding for me as a teacher, I walk around the room and marvel at the creativity, and step back to listen in to the critical thinking and problem-solving conversations students are having independently:

"But how would a waterproof robot work though, how would it would actually collect the rubbish without harming sea animals?"

"Well, maybe it would have a special filter that detects whether something is made of plastic. I guess I need to think a bit more."

"Who would use your product?"

"Is that realistic, could you really build it?"

"That is an awesome idea, can I work with you on that? I think we could make it go viral!"

The thing about student-led learning is that it often goes in a direction that I wouldn't have thought of! If it had been up to me as the teacher I probably would have chosen poverty or food security as the "big picture" problem; many of my students are directly impacted by poverty and I thought that would be quite empowering for them. Then I really liked one of the pollution ideas, that we could help lessen the impact of air pollution by creating protective domes. Students would come up with a way to keep the dome at the ideal temperature for growing trees and/or food sources. But the student who came up with that idea also had plenty more ideas and he chose to go down a different direction.

Perhaps that's one of the things that excites me about teaching STEM, I can never predict where our learning will take us and I'm always pleasantly suprised by the outcome!

Here are some of the ideas that students have decided to develop further:

   

Once students had some ideas about what they might like to create as a STEM solution, we went back to the “Discover” stage of the design thinking process, where they thought about the user of the solution. They used canva to create empathy maps to think about what the users see, say, hear, think and feel.

This is the empathy map that one group created:

"The Recycle Dash App is aimed towards young people our age and older. We thought that it could also appeal to anyone who likes playing interactive games on their phones, so maybe families could get involved too."

Computational Thinking

What is computational thinking? I just created a brief presentation for teacher PD to explain some of the key concepts of computational thinking. I think the simplest explanation is that computational thinking = solving problems logically!

Powtoon is a great online tool to use to create short videos. My presentation is embedded below, but it may take a moment to load. The other resource that I used in this presentation was Bebras 365. I included two of their past questions as examples of problems that require computational thinking.


 

Futurists' Fair - Week 2

Prior to beginning our second week of the Futurists' Fair project, I wanted to link this work to the professional development I participated in at STEM X Academy with CSIRO future scenarios. As a whole class group, the Year 5/6s looked at a few short videos produced by CSIRO and then unpacked some information from CSIRO's report, Australia 2030: Navigating our uncertain future. This report details a scenarios-based outlook for Australia's future.

I then used the future scenarios as prompts for small group discussions, and this helped to tune students into the “bigger picture” of problems we face now and in the future at a local and more global level. The main scenario students looked at was about 'Planetary Pushback' and the impact that humans are having on the environment.  Some students had expressed interest in invasive species, so they looked at environmental impacts. Students had some very deep and interesting discussions, I loved being a fly on the wall! The future scenario work was a really effective way to tap into the problems that concern my students, the big questions and worries that they have about their future world and how they would solve those issues.

For the second stage of our Futurists' Fair work, I made a quick "flipped classroom" video using the student app Seesaw to set the stage. I wanted students to choose just one idea that they felt passionate about and come up with a quick persuasive presentation to convince others to vote for their idea. To save time, I borrowed some animation clips from CSIRO's Australian National Outlook video for my background:

Students were able to decide whether they would prefer to work alone or in a small group for this component of the project. We used post-it notes to list what they were most passionate about and would like to work on. This process helped students to form groups with people that had the same 'big ideas'. We noticed that most ideas fit into four main categories: Poverty/homelessness, Endangered Species, Human impact on pollution and climate change and Invasive species. 

All of my students ended up finding someone that had a similar idea and got to work researching their problem. Things didn't quite go to plan! My students were so invested in their research and persuasive presentations that I allowed them to keep going for two whole lessons (rather than the initial 30 minutes I had planned for!). When students are intrinsically motivated and engaged in their learning, I think it's really important to allow them that extra time for them to go deeper with the learning... so week 2 turned into week 3! 

Students presented their ideas for the problem they would like to solve for the Futurists' Fair. We had two teachers and the rest of the class acting as a "shark tank panel" to provide feedback on their presentation skills. Students then voted for two ideas (their own and one other!). They tallied up the results and found that pollution scraped in as the winner by 3 points! A small group of students then worked on creating a video for our class to present at the Futurists' Fair.