My students need Design and Play STEAM kits, STEM learning labs, Create-A-Chain Reaction STEM kit, Energy Crisis Project-Based STEM kit, and Building Brick STEM challenge kit to really provide them with a hands-on learning experience.
I teach at a high poverty, multicultural, inner city school. Funding cuts are at an all time high which severely limits our resources. My students are energetic and eager to learn new things in my science lab. Many students range in academic abilities. They are a mix of diverse learners including students who receive special education services, regular education students, and those identified for our gifted education program. All of my students deserve a high quality education that can meet their individual learning needs.
My Project
All of these STEM resources will provide exciting and challenging hands-on experiences for my students. I want them to be inspired and believe that they can become future engineers. The materials will provide real life challenges that students can brainstorm solutions to solve the problems. Students can work in teams to collaborate ideas, share their design ideas, then build their models with the resource materials, and test them out. They will then be able to share their design process and how they thought their design tested. They will be able to revise their ideas and continue to test. Engineers need to evaluate their work and make needed suggestions for improvements.
In the primary grades, the students will explore the Create-A-Chain Reaction kits while they study force and motion.
They will design, build, test, and redesign a variety of models. I want them to be able to ask questions, define problems, plan, and carry out investigations.
In the intermediate grades, students will use a variety of the STEM kits to enhance their learning. One example is while studying Earth's systems I plan to have students design and create models of buildings and test them in a variety of natural disaster situations.
All of the STEM kits will provide my students with resources that will meet NGSS and allow them to define engineering problems, develop possible solutions, and optimize a variety of design solutions.
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