On Thursday, November 7 superintendent Marty Miller brought in Discovery Education to promote the STEM program to teachers, administrators, and business leaders throughout the area. STEM stands for Students, Teachers, Engaging Minds.
Cindy Moss from Discovery Education had an excellent program prepared for the educators that not only showed how important hands-on learning is to the development and excitement of the brain to promote learning and integrating courses in a person’s education career. Moss showed that in real life learning does not just happen in a 45 minute class, then moving to science for 45 minutes and then moves to English for 40 minutes, but that all of these subjects need to integrate together for education and learning.
The guiding questions that the STEM program asked each participant to think about: 1. What are the characteristics and dispositions you need in employees that you would like Antwerp School faculty to cultivate? 2. How are the essential skills of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking used in your endeavors? 3. How would you like to be involved in this STEM initiative with Antwerp Schools? 4. Lastly, it was open for questions for any of the participants.
A person might work on an experiment in science class will calculating the water amount needed and then go on to write a report, incorporating many vocabulary words and grammar essentials. All of this would be considered an Integrated Learning Experience and be hands on.
One project Cindy Moss had everyone do involved straws and connectors – three of each every participant. The tables were already in groups of four and she showed a series of images on the overhead display and asked each person to make them. The first image was a simple triangle. The next was a square, and since each person only had three pieces, they had to ask the next group and collaborate to share parts.
The next shape was a pentagon and the shapes became more complex to include all four people in that group. The complexity culminated with a dodecahedron which meant now the adjacent tables had to cooperate all together to build the entire shape because there weren’t enough parts at any one table.
This is the kind of hands-on learning that takes place in the STEM program from a very early age. Another aspect of the program is to get kids to think as innovators. A series of three short videos were shown to everyone in the classroom of how people started to make changes in their own community to make a difference with the water supply in Africa; save the food supply with a longer lifespan naturally using paper; or making the golf ball hit further depending on the temperature of the ball.
During a short break, the Antwerp teachers showed the other participants what the kids were doing in the library with programming and other parts with motors to build cars with Legos and other dynamically thinking challenging projects. Librarian Media Specialist, Kayla Bagley, then gave a tour of the Media Center also known as the broadcasting room. It showed how far the school has come in the last five years in the studio, getting a channel on YouTube and getting all the students involved in what it takes to make a production every single morning. Some students are required to work on projects and stories that will be shown in the weeks to come, and some of these projects can be fairly long. The Antwerp Broadcasting has received awards for the quality of content and broadcast that the students and teachers have done. After the delicious lunch, provided by Grant’s Catering, the administrators from around the area got to watch students work with electronics, science, physics and other stations on a rotation to every few minutes.
