Help me give my students LEGO Simple and Powered Machine sets, LEGO Simple Machine sets, a glockenspiel, and music box mechanisms to bring a little STEAM to our STEM Lab.
“Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.” - Mae Jemison, first African American woman astronaut in space.
I teach first to eighth grade gifted students in rural Southwest Missouri.
I teach these students in small groups of 6 to 14 for 2 1/2 hours per week. These vibrant, eager students need opportunities to stretch and grow their minds in ways they can't always do in a regular classroom.
Innovation, creativity and critical thinking are learned skills that require instruction and practice. Critical thinking and problem solving can be taught by using instructional strategies that actively engage students in the learning process rather than relying on lecture and rote memorization and by focusing instruction on the process of learning rather than solely on the content.
My Project
We are failing as a society to inspire our girls to learn science and math; only one in three students that graduates from high school is ready for college-level science. Could this be because of the way STEM concepts are taught? We approach STEM education with the assumption that the stuff we are teaching is inherently boring, and that kids must simply slog through the boredom in order to gain some abstract future reward, like getting a good job. It’s no surprise that our kids are not interested.
Rather than presenting STEM as a way of succeeding in an adult world they don’t care about, we should instead be teaching it as a way for children to understand their own world.
One powerful way of doing this is by relating it to something that children love: Music.
Each year I spend time teaching my students the concepts of computer coding. This year I am extending this learning by introducing them to programming robots. Unfortunately I have a large number of girls in my classes who are not especially interested in robotics or coding. But they are interested in music. My plan is to encourage them to use the LEGO Simple Machine and Powered Machine sets to engineer robotic music boxes that can be programmed to play music on the Glockenspiel or the music box mechanism.
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