 I'm Scott McLeod, Director of Innovation for the ADA. Prairie Lakes serves about 45 school districts and about a dozen private schools in a geographic area about the size of New Jersey. We're a regional educational service agency that sits between the State Department of Education and our individual districts and schools. So today we're going to talk about what makes a quality STEM activity. We're going to highlight the importance of the design engineering cycle and go through a bunch of activities like robots and rockets and skimmers and whatever else we can come up with just to kind of show you the stuff in action and we'll sort of explain some things as we go along. Yep and we're going to put emphasis on the fact that this we're not the traveling STEM carnival right. We want to wrap this into learning, to deep understanding, to critical thinking and not just be a one-and-done experience for kids to get excited about but it has very little educational value to it. Right I think the challenge is that STEM stuff can be really cool, it can be fun, it's exciting, kids are engaged and enthusiastic to go home to other parents but like Mike said we don't want to be carnies right. We don't want to be like the carnival comes to town and it's fun and cool but then you go away and like okay back to regular business but STEM should really be a way of thinking, it should be a way of doing, a way of being, it should be connected to deeper learning material over time it should just be you know a one-time event. Right it's a great chance for kids to inquire about the world around them and explore it through hands-on activities. So thanks for joining us today or whenever you're watching it. Tonight, tomorrow, and we'll see you at the end. Thanks. Thanks. Here we'll see Colin engaging in the thrust wars activity and the object here is to get the balloon to cross the distance on the fishing line so students have to come up with the device that will hold the balloon on the line and possibly carry passengers. I don't do hope that the weight of this will balance it though and I think the most fun about making this we're not trying to get it to go but just making the initial design and all the useless features like the locking door. So by now Colin has realized that his device is probably too heavy to actually make it to the other end of the fishing line. It's it's got a lot of cardboard a lot of tape and you know but he's realized that as part of the design process even before he even tested and that sort of critical thinking about outcomes is what we want in kids. Okay Gabby so you have a new design here why don't you tell us a little bit about it and and what you changed? First of all I put things on to kind of push the air kind of through that. Second of all I put this in a different place before it was up here now I put it down here. Okay let's take a look. I didn't let it go at the right time other than it would have been. Wait let me try again I'll just pump it up. Lucas is working on the skimmer task and in this activity students are asked to create what looks like a boat to go from the start line to the finish line. It could be based on time it could also be based on how many passengers it can carry. In this case it's carrying paper clips. Okay Lucas you made some changes to your skimmer tell us about them. Yeah so I added just these because I thought they would help keep it from tipping over since it was falling towards the front and the sides so I put in like little rods to keep it stable there and then I added this to keep passengers from falling off. So Lucas's design has failed and he's now working on redesign like Colin had before so and that's what we want kids to do. We want kids testing out things collecting data getting feedback of some kind and then redesigning. If you really wanted to get fancy we could pull in an app like this one. So here's a skimmer from a different time some hit play here. This is a three sail skimmer and it's on pressure right now right I'll go back to the smoke. So you can see the three sails right there. There we go so you can see that first sail is the one that really harnesses most of the wind energy and the next two a little bit. If I go to pressure right you see there's that red that's piled up against that back one and then there's almost like a low pressure of vacuum here. Right. Afterwards. Right and okay got it and you can see there's a little push at the back and what looks also like a little bit at the front. Yep. For whatever that is. All right cool so again you can see the vectors of the flow and the energy push and so on. Very cool. Yep so a very cool app I think it's $2.99 sometimes it's free so. Thank you Mike. You're welcome. Here we have kids making water rockets out of soda bottles. The goal is to get these things to launch and go high. Lots of opportunities here that you'll see as they're designing and creating for developmental open-endedness depending on what their readiness is and what their interest is where they can test out different designs and make them look the way they want. So students are engaging in these activities it's important for them to record data so in the case of the water rockets we had altimeters that would give us velocity, apogee or the highest the rocket went and students could then take this data and make decisions using it as far as when they went into the redesign stage and then they would build and retest and take more data and just continue through this process. That data collection doesn't have to be fancy we just mocked up a quick data table with chalk on the sidewalk. Yep it doesn't have to be a google form on the iPad you can just write down a piece of paper the important thing is you're recording data so you can make decisions based on it. But if you want to pull in the technology they could obviously plot it and graph it using a spreadsheet program. Absolutely. Robots may be one of the first things you think of when you think of STEM and they are a valuable tool because it gives students the opportunity to not only engineer a solution but also have to program for a solution. Yeah so this time we're using the gyro sensor which is actually going to it measures the angle that the robot is turning. Okay got it. All right let's try it. Notice that one of the things that's important here is the ability for Mike and I to interact and try this as adults right as educators and so you know you can't just hand these robots to teachers and expect them to do amazing things with them they need the same kind of experiences and challenges that we've now set for ourselves we're saying all right let's make a track let's see if we can navigate the track let's understand how the different sensors work so if you're doing any kind of robotics work with elementary teachers they're going to need this hands-on play time right to figure out how this stuff works. Go ahead Mike can you set it going? Okay so now we're on round two where we're asking the kids to do something a little more complex so Mike what what what do we got going on now? Okay so now they have to program the robot to go the distance so there are no sensors involved. So they need to program the robot to go the distance and there's several ways to do that and we're using rotations so they had to figure out how far is the distance the robot's going to travel and then they also have to figure out how far around is it for one rotation of course that can be different depending on what wheels you're using okay so for these wheels they'd have to measure the circumference around okay and then divide and that's how many rotations they have to program into the robot. Okay so now would we have them just measure around the wheel or could we do something like calculated from the diameter or right so again depending on the age of the kids and what content that they're going to interact with in math you know you could have them use the formula you could have them just measure around. Robots are a ton of fun I think that's clear but we want to make sure we're pulling in meaningful learning too and so you know there's an opportunity here to pull in math in an authentic way and we need to make sure we're doing that otherwise this is sort of like a sideshow just as we talked about we don't want it to be carnival we want to speak a meaningful learning experience. The robots can take the role of rovers during the STEM camp students were asked to design a rover that could drive around the Mars surface and pick up dirt and take some measurements as they did so they were not allowed to see Mars they had to interact with it using a GoPro camera and a remote control for their rover. Notice how important collaboration is to all of this these students have to work together they have to generate ideas together they have to bounce ideas off each other there's no way that this is going to be successful if they're not working collaboratively to make this happen they're testing ideas they're brainstorming they're identifying potential solutions they're working together to make them happen there's no reason that students should ever have to work in isolation in a rich STEM activity we want them working together to solve problems just like scientists and engineers have to do in the real world right. Hey thanks for watching today we know you're busy and we appreciate you spent a little time with us we're just going to cover a couple things here at the end just sort of reinforce some things we talked about throughout the video. Yep and one thing we want to hit is that STEM isn't necessarily always going to be strong in all four areas science technology engineering mathematics but there are certainly a few things we want to look for in every STEM activity lesson unit whatever you may be doing. So for example it better be hands-on right so if you're running kids through textbook chapters or worksheets and you're trying to call it STEM you're sort of missing the point right so it should really be rich in terms of hand hands-on learning hopefully maybe it's got some inquiry in that you know that's what kids are looking for that's where the enthusiasm and engagement comes from right. We also want to make sure that we're going through the engineering cycle and design thinking with multiple iterations it's not enough just to go through once and have students create a skimmer or a rocket and then launch it and be done with it they need to design create and then test collect some data and be able to go back and decide how they would redesign and rebuild and then retest it again the more we can go through that cycle the more rich that learning activity is going to be right. Sort of drawing off the carnival point at the beginning of the video is that let's make sure that our activities you know they're fun they're cool but let's make sure they're connected to real learning hopefully some deep important concepts not just minutiae and that kids really get a chance to immerse themselves in math and science and engineering in ways that maybe mirror at least as much as possible what scientists and engineers and mathematicians do in the real world. Yep we also want students to be working in groups so they can collaborate and then we're thinking about how they can communicate out their work. We don't want this to be an individual activity because in the real world engineers work together to accomplish tasks and to build and to Yeah, we ran out of gas and add a lot of motivation to whatever we're doing if we make it a problem or challenge base. So if we throw out the students that they need to create something there's a problem how can we fix that problem how can we design something that will achieve a solution to a challenge that will push them to discover to critically think to collaborate with others in order to accomplish that task. So give them some kind of goal orientation don't let it just be something that you do in isolation science decontextualize give them something to strive for. And whenever possible we want that to reflect the real world what engineers are doing the real world too so keep that in mind too. Let's see what else is on our list. You can use tech appropriately and creatively throughout the process so you can use it for capturing and recording data plotting it out charting it out you can use it for sharing out to the public so it's a great way to capture process some pictures video electronic writing to you know accompany whatever you're doing their hands-on in the room as we capture their prototype in action so they can reflect back on it. Now sometimes when we have students you know send their skimmer down the aisle right or launch their rocket and then we go back and ask questions about they can't really remember everything that happened so if we can record that and then we can show them back sometimes some learning will come out of that and then when they go back to the redesign piece it's a lot more rich. Right photos are a great way to have them explain their designs or explain something that happened during the process where they can label it or voice narrated or something like that. Also we want to make sure that these are developmentally open-ended with lots of choice agency for students so for instance you probably notice with our skimmer activity we have lots of materials out we don't want to limit their choices as to what they can build their skimmer out of or build rocket out of or whatever they may be doing. We want to make sure they have plenty of choice plenty of options to try out. So Mike you want to talk let's end with process sounds good. So as they're creating things as they're designing things it's really not about the product they're making it's more about the process they're going through and we've talked sort of this whole session this whole video about the engineering process and going through those steps and that's where the richness of stem lies that's where the power of it lies is going through that collaborating that's where we're going to uncover those conceptual understandings that we want and so we really want to focus on the process and you know you saw the skimmers we made were not very good right but the learning that happened through creating those that's that's where the power is. So be sure you capture that process right okay thanks for joining us our contact info follows be sure to get in touch if you have any kind of questions or you want to share your own stories or you know anything else that you want we'll be glad to chat thanks see you. Dream big!