Hands-on Learning Makes STEM Cool!
Submitted by Change the Equation on Fri, 2012-06-15 12:54
The last two weeks of school for first- through fourth-grade students at Centennial Lane Elementary School in Ellicott City, MD, was full of fun, innovation, and “learning with their hands.” An article in the Baltimore Sun showed students embracing STEM learning while they built planes, cars, and boats.
Principal Brad Herling finds “kids are more engaged, and sometimes more successful ... They can see the vision — they can look at a block of Styrofoam and see a race car in there.”
Recent research looked at students who engaged in hands-on science activities at least once or twice a week. The NAEP results revealed these students may learn much more than their peers do.
"It's cool because we get to build our own boat and watch it do something," said Piper Berry, a fourth-grader at Centennial Lane Elementary.
As Piper says, STEM is cool!
Comments
It's true! And especially
It's true! And especially true for our young women, youth of color and youth whose families live with low incomes, as we have found with our Boston Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn STEM program.
If you were at Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn this past Saturday, you would have seen over 30 Boston teenagers preparing to become youth teachers this summer, bringing hands-on STEM (and STEAM) activities to over 500 elementary and middle school youth in over 20 community organizations.
This was a physical programming weekend, so half the youth were building Fabduinos, soldering tiny circuit boards with microcontrollers that they will allow them to hook up and program sensors and motors later on to create projects. The other group were building and programming drawing robots using Modkit, a drag and drop physical programming environment.
For the past ten years, we have found that personalized hands-on activities in computer programming, physical programming, digital design and fabrication, energy alternatives and graphic design really work. What also works is having teenage youth teachers design and lead the activities. The younger children always want to be doing what the cool teenagers are doing.
Programs like ours always need support and help, so if you find yourself in Boston, come see what our youth can do and talk to them about opportunities in STEM and STEAM!
Our little rather homegrown blog can be found at:
www.learn2teachteach2learn.posterous.com
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