In recent weeks, I’ve been wrapping up several ambitious STEM projects. Maybe you know the type? The projects that start out seeming totally doable and manageable, but then continue to grow in complexity as unanticipated challenges and students’ grand visions enter the picture. While I am fortunate to see my students for five consecutive days to allow for rich project work, the projects that I’ll feature in this installment of “What I’m Teaching” stretched beyond those five days, requiring students to press pause for five weeks and then pick the work back up during our next stretch of classes together. I must say, I’ve been impressed by the way the motivation for these projects has carried over those long, multi-week pauses and am fairly pleased with how these projects turned out.
On balance, I probably feature my work with K-4 on this blog more than my work with my students in grade 5-8. So, in this post, I’m going to share only work that I’ve been doing with my middle schoolers, who also benefit (and learn a lot!) from messy, hands-on “play.”
7th & 8th Grade | Cardboard Automata
Automata are one of my favorite hands-on builds for my upper-level students because they provide an opportunity for students to make full use of all of the materials and tools (3D printing, laser-cutting) that we’ve learned about throughout their years in STEM class. If you’re unfamiliar with automata, they are essentially mechanical sculptures, where a system of cams/gears makes motion happen. (Here’s a video of some sophisticated automata and here’s a sample project from Exploratorium).
To me, this project is the essence of Playful STEM. It’s engaging, fun-strating due to lots of trial and error, and open-ended enough to allow students to inject their interests and creativity into their designs. I’m still wrapping up this project with my last groups, but here’s a look at some of their work in progress.
6th Grade| Sewable Circuits
I knew heading in that this project was going to be a lift, but I’ve been determined to tackle this project for years and finally decided to go for it. And, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, this project was (at times) an absolute nightmare to facilitate. I paced out the first rotation of classes well, focusing on revisiting building circuits in the first class, learning and practicing sewing basics in classes 2-3, and then having students create plans and paper-based prototypes in classes 4-5.
Where things got messy was when we entered rotation #2 and (after the 5-week pause) there was a lot of forgetting of the newly learned sewing skills and a lot of struggle with translating the circuit knowledge they’d built using batteries, LEDs, and alligator wires into using conductive thread to sew their circuits. This led to me needing to do more direct facilitation than I usually do, as students needed clear diagrams, visuals, and checklists. Ultimately, I had to adapt my success criteria (requiring only 1 LED to light instead of 2) to avoid having to keep extending this project into a third rotation because the work just kept expanding!
Before I scare you off trying this out with your students, highlights of this project were the class-wide jubilation when someone would get an LED to light with their conductive thread, lots of peer-to-peer support with threading needles and troubleshooting, and consistently high student motivation (I was truly surprised by how responsive students were to learning how to sew!).
5th Grade| String Art
Another project that I’ve been wanting to give a spin for ages was a string art project. It seemed like a great opportunity to give students meaningful practice with using hammers and nails in the context of a design challenge. I also incorporated some exposure to Google Drawings by having students work through creating a digital prototype of their design.
Here’s a look at the project success criteria:
Challenges in this project included guiding students through choosing achievable designs (some had aspirations to use 100 nails!), sourcing enough hammers for largish classes, and helping students secure their strings (I would definitely review tying knots if I repeated the project!). Overall, this was a project where students were able to work fairly independently and it had a great feedback loop that allowed students to make adjustments as they worked.
Do you have a creative, playful STEM design challenge that you use with middle school students? I’d love to hear about it!