May often seems like the fastest month of the school year to me – there are many professional obligations to wrap up the year and I’m typically facilitating more complex activities because students are ready to tackle them after building their skills over the course of our year in STEM. In short, I always find myself trying to do too much in too little time!
When planning for the end of the year, I save my most challenging and engaging activities to try to land in the sweet spot of tasks that can both capture student interest and entice them to apply and push their skills in the waning days of school. Curious what that looks like? Here’s a look at some of what I’m teaching this week.
2nd Grade | Plant Power!
Once May arrives, I am always eager to find ways to get students outdoors for our STEM classes. One of my favorite second grade activities is my Plant Power STEM project, where students combine design and engineering to become creative botanists.
The Plant-Power STEM project takes place over three class periods.
| Class #1 | Time for some outdoor STEM! Students learn about botanists and spend time examining and drawing flowers, bushes, and trees that they find around our school. |
| Class #2 | We review the different parts of plants and students then use Makerspace materials to create a new, never-before-seen plant. They design a flower, a fruit, and a leaf. |
| Class #3 | Students take part in stem STEM! (Second graders dig this pun!) They become engineers and work to create a system of roots and stems that can support their flowers, fruits, and leaves. |
Students always embrace this project with enthusiasm and creativity – their designs are unique and they discuss them with such pride during our sharing time.
5th & 6th Grade | Artbots
My middle school students are in the midst of their first exposure to Lego Robotics and are loving the fusion of engineering and coding. Pre-COVID, this was a more robust part of my curriculum, but it was challenging to find a way to make it work with distancing guidelines when students need to share a kit. Needless to say, it’s nice to be back to groupwork and I saved the Lego work for this final STEM rotation of the year to drive engagement when motivation might be starting to taper off.
Their task in this project is to create an Artbot that can be programmed to draw. There are two versions of the challenge – Paper Doodler, where the Artbot can draw on paper and Whiteboard Writer, where they must design a robot that can draw as it moves along the tray of a whiteboard.
In the first two days of the project, my students hit that “fun-strating” spot where I believe the best STEM learning happens – they were perplexed by the kit and how the components worked and experienced lots of failures as they tinkered with their first designs. My current group of students didn’t need much coaching on how to turn their missteps into opportunities to fail forward – they’ve been iterating and improving to create successful designs. I’ve now had groups succeed at both challenges and I am enjoying seeing their “A-ha” moments as they make discoveries about the components and how to design a vehicle that can achieve a desired function.
7th & 8th Grade | Cardboard Pinball Machines
As I mentioned in my last “What I’m Teaching” update, I’ve been experimenting during the spring trimester with a double-rotation project for my 7th and 8th grade students. This experiment lets me explore facilitating a longer, larger project and also provides more space and time for my middle school students to bring their ideas to life – instead of working on the project for 5 class periods (our standard timeframe), students have 9-10 classes of work time.
Over the past couple of weeks, groups have returned to the STEM lab for the second half of this project and I’ve been impressed by their ability to pick the work back up after a 5-6 week hiatus. While I’m still collecting observations and data, thus far the overall quality of products has ticked upward and 96% of students reported enjoying the double-rotation of work time – that’s more than the 92% that said they liked the project, so I’m thinking about how I can build space for these larger projects in the future.
Despite the extra time, the wonder of STEM is that no matter how long you give for a project, most students end up requesting and wanting more time! While many of the pinball machines are still a work-in-progress – did I mention this is a big, difficult project? – the creative applications of laser-cutting and 3D printing coupled with the whimsical themes have made this a playful, joyful project to witness and facilitate.
Above: An ocean-themed game featuring a lasercut pineapple and a 3D-printed lifeguard buoy.
Left: A fun baseball-themed game.
Below: A video showing one of our pinball machines in action!
So there you have it — a look at the May mayhem currently taking place in the STEM Lab. It’s hard to believe we have just five weeks left to go in the school year!