STEM is currently a zeitgeisty area in education because these fields are the future and we need people who will assume careers in these areas in the coming decades. While I wholeheartedly agree that we do need engineers, biostatisticians, and geoscientists, I’d argue that the more pressing need in our rapidly-evolving society is for thinkers.
The mismatch between this need for original and confident thinkers and the rise of standardized curricula and leveled reading in our schools often means that the opportunities for kids to make authentic, meaningful choices guided by their own interests are few and far between. Creative spaces are increasingly rare in our education system and I see part of my role as a STEM educator as protecting students’ rights to play, to explore, and to tinker. STEM activities can be excellent ways for kids to practice tinkering with their ideas and to grow as empowered thinkers.
So what exactly do I mean by Playful STEM? Here are four crucial elements that allow Playful STEM to be in full GEAR.
- Give Open-Ended Prompts with Lots of Choice
When I design an activity for my students, I like to leave as much space for creativity as I possibly can. This doesn’t mean that kids come into my room and can do whatever they want, but it does mean that I strive to provide lots of freedom and choice in how they will approach the project prompt. What does this look like in action? Consider the differences in these two different presentations of a common STEM task – creating a catapult.
“You will use a plastic spoon, a rubber band, and three popsicle sticks to create a catapult. I’ve provided some pictures of catapults to inspire your thinking.”
“Today we will be exploring ways that we could make a pompom hit a target. You may use the items on our Materials Buffet to design your creation. Test your creation at our short, medium, and long distance targets.”
The first presentation isn’t necessarily bad, as students will need to do some thinking to consider how to combine the provided materials to create their catapults. However, the prompt does foreclose the possibility of creating something other than a catapult and providing pictures prevents students from discovering the advantages of the structure of a catapult for themselves. In the second prompt, you can feel the choice and sense of playfulness. The goal is defined – a pompom needs to hit a target – but students will choose materials from a Materials Buffet (a curated selection of items that I’ll talk more about in an upcoming post), combine them in any way that they see fit, and decide which difficulty level they want to use to test their creation.
- Emphasize Collaboration, Not Competition
STEM challenges are often set up as competitions, where students are comparing their work to someone else’s to see whose creation will be taller, faster, or stronger. Yet, the research is clear that competition undermines the very thing we’re hoping to foster in STEM-learning – creative risk-taking.1 There are certainly many students who (at least on the surface) seem motivated by competition, but in my experience, students persist less with their ideas in competitive situations, particularly when they can look across the room and see that another student or group already has a taller/faster/stronger design and the clock is ticking. Instead of pitting peers against each other and encouraging what I call “idea hoarding” – the desire to keep a good idea secret so others can’t replicate or tinker with it – I work to set peers up as collaborators, through practices such as cooperative groupwork and idea-focused gallery walks. Ideas are the currency of Playful STEM and everyone wins when they can be shared freely and explored with curiosity.
- Aim for Curiosity, Exploration, and Tinkering
Can I let you in on a secret? I’m actually not all that concerned with whether my students complete a given task successfully. I think we’ve all experienced that the correlation between effort and results is often murky at best. I sometimes have students get lucky and stumble on a creation that meets our objectives without expending much mental energy, but I wouldn’t say that their work is “better” than a student who engages in repeated iteration of an idea that ultimately doesn’t work. (If anything, I’d be more prone to celebrate the efforts of the second student.) In STEM education, we’re rightly encouraged to focus on process over product – but this is sometimes undermined when we assign a score to a final product or have students pit their creations against one another (see above). In my classroom, I try to keep almost all emphasis on the process – nothing delights me more than when a learner has created something that I think is absolutely fabulous, yet they share with me an idea that they have for continuing to improve their design. Successful thinkers in STEM are curious, eager to explore possibilities, and continue to tinker rather than saying, “I’m done.”
4. Resist the Urge to Drive the Thinking
To be a STEM teacher focused on fostering student thinking means allowing students to follow their ideas – even when those ideas are likely to flop. It also requires letting students struggle and experience the feeling of being perplexed without stepping in and solving the problem for them. This doesn’t mean we can’t make students feel supported, though, as we can engage them in thoughtful dialogue with a goal of guiding them towards getting unstuck and taking further action. Using probing, open-ended questions can often get students reflecting on what is working and where further attention may be warranted. In fact, my students often remark that when they ask me for help, I respond by asking them questions instead of just telling them what to do. A good (though not foolproof) litmus test for whether you’re guiding or driving is noticing whether your hands are on the materials with which students are working – if I’m demonstrating how some blocks might be stacked or how some cardboard might be stabilized, there’s a good chance that I’m taking away a learning opportunity from a student. Reining in the urge to drive is not easy, but I continually find that students respond with deep thinking and creative ideas when I am able to hold back.
These four tenets constitute what Playful STEM means to me and serve as my compass as I’m designing learning experiences for my students. Don’t let the “playful” fool you – kids in my class think hard about their work, but they also frequently experience the joy of engaging in hard fun.
1 See Kohn (1987) “The Case Against Competition” (https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-competition/) and his broader work on the negative effects of competition.