Watching children play, particularly very young children, we can see they behave scientifically.
Children observe and collect. They wonder and deduce, and they’re methodical. They collaborate – sometimes! – and when they’re puzzled, they experiment and make adjustments.
At whatever age STEM learning occurs, though, make no mistake: it is real STEM learning, not mere child’s play (McClure, 2017). The earlier that children begin STEM activities, the sooner they begin to hone what Katehi, Pearson, and Feder (2009) call engineering habits of mind: systems thinking, creativity, optimism, communication, collaboration, supported persistence, and attention to ethical thinking. And, obviously, these habits of mind apply to more than just STEM work.
“In the minds of these children, too, there was a complex inner process – one that is hard to see, which often results in adults underestimating young children’s current capacities” (McClure, 2017, p. 84)
Teachers can make good habits, too, while teaching STEM-related material, which again can apply beyond STEM lessons: designing and facilitating experiential learning tasks, for instance, or asking questions of students vs providing them with answers, or collaborating with colleagues and the local community. Before long, students and teachers are spotting STEM links all over the curriculum. For instance, classroom engineering activities become a practical way for students to see abstractions like mathematics in action while a look at simple machines prompts the chance to notice just how commonly we rely on them every single day.
Along with reinforcing habits of mind, sustained STEM learning also influences students’ longer-term post-secondary and professional decisions. As we look for ways to make STEM careers more inclusive and accessible to all, researchers have found that women who were made more aware of career opportunities during their school years were more likely to select engineering as a post-secondary degree major (Tyler-Wood et al., 2012; Frehill, 1997).
“A STEM identity is developed by active participation in the environment” (Subramaniam et al., 2012, p. 176)
Learn from the educators at UBC Engineering’s Geering Up Program about how to design your own design challenge using this resource they’ve shared with us!
Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design
Recap of Create, Make, Innovate! session, held on Tuesday, November 12th, 2019 in the Scarfe foyer: It all about simple machines: wheel-and-axle, wedges, inclined planes, pulleys, levers, and screws.
Free Clip Art by >\\sas from clker.com
Using a variety of basic tools, e.g. scissors, screwdriver, a small X-acto knife, you and your students can design and build simple machines of your own, with inexpensive everyday materials like dowels and planks of wood, cardboard tubing, pipe cleaners, buttons with twist ties, string or twine, and a spring scale. By planning ahead and adjusting after experimentation, they will be able to tackle straightforward design challenges that illustrate physical concepts in action, like force, work, friction, mechanical advantage, and the law of conservation of energy, just to name a few.
Simple machines are found literally everywhere, and they are a super way to introduce students to physics and engineering.
Free Photo by vũ tuấn from Unsplash
A basic model approach to engineering really does read like children at play: observe, design, build, experiment, adjust. For hands-on classroom activities, it’s hard to find something more stimulating, more instructive, or more fun than simple machines and engineering. And because simple machines have no power source and require someone or something to make them work, what better source of energy than curious students and their teachers!
Resources
British Columbia’s K–12 curriculum features a subject discipline called Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies (ADST), which “builds on students’ natural curiosity, inventiveness, and desire to create and work in practical ways” in order to “… provide firm foundations for lifelong learning.” As early as Kindergarten, students can take a role in learning how to apply ADST principles such as cross-disciplinary thinking, collaboration, and contextualised problem-solving.
On the Scarfe Digital Sandbox, you’ll find some terrific STEM resources, like PhET, which is particularly about Engineering, including simple machines, and also Arduino, specific to electronics, another fun STEM topic we explored back in September.
Check out the Boston Museum of Science website, where the month of November 2019 is Women and Girls in STEM Month. You can explore the Museum’s wide array of engineering lesson ideas and activities, which are suitable for all ages.
In-class, project-based learning has proven effective for student learning as compared to out-of-class projects, which are less significant. (Hansen & Gonzalez, 2014)
Read about some very young engineers and their simple machines in this article from the Early Childhood Research and Practice (ECRP) open-source e-journal, published by Loyola University in Chicago.
Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak
Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.
Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.
If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca
References
Frehill, L. (1997, Spring). Education and occupational sex segregation: The decision to major in Engineering. The Sociological Quarterly, 38(2), 225–249.
Katehi, L., Pearson, G., & Feder, M. (Eds.). (2009). Engineering in K-12 education: Understanding the status and improving the prospects. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/read/12635/chapter/1
McClure, E. (2017, November). More than a foundation: Young children are capable STEM learners. YC Young Children, 72(5), 83–89.
Subramaniam, M., Ahn, J., Fleischmann, K., & Druin, A. (2012, April). Reimagining the role of school libraries in STEM education: Creating hybrid spaces for exploration. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 82(2), 161–182.
Tyler-Wood, T., Ellison, A., Lim, O., & Periathiruvadi, S. (2012, February). Bringing up girls in Science (BUGS): The effectiveness of an afterschool environmental Science program for increasing female students’ interest in Science careers. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 21(1), 46–55.
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