STEM Discovery Week 2019 – Page 2 – Participants of SCIENTIX & SYSTEMIC competitions are invited to blog about their activities for the STEM Discovery Week 2019 here!

CSI: The brain collector serial killer case

Brief project description

“CSI: The brain collector serial killer case” is an Educational Escape Room (EER) activity with a focus on learning about human’s nervous system designed and implemented by 16-year old high school students from “Ekpaideutiki Anagennisi” in Afidnes, Greece on 19th of March 2019. But …. what is an EER?

What exactly is an Educational Escape Room?

Escape rooms are live action, team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time. Over the last year, there’s been worldwide growth in creating and introducing into the classrooms Educational Escape Room activities (EERs), facilitated by educators that have adapted the initial concept to fit the needs of their students.

What makes these activities special compared to other examples of gamification in education that have been studied in the past regarding their educational impact on the learners, is the fact that they can provide a thrilling, immersive learning experience that can intrigue students’ minds and assist them to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The incorporated collaborative elements of these activities and the limited time frame that students have at their disposal promote the development of their social and team-working skills that are necessary for them in order to succeed.

FLIGHT MODE

Within the scope of the Scientix Project, we, 30 Ağustos Secondary School, carried out a two-day project called Flight Mode on STEM Education Discovery Week between 22-30 April 2019 in order to encourage students to interrogate, investigate, produce and make inventions in European countries.

The general purposes of our project are; to instil the love of aviation to our students, to increase their knowledge about aviation and to have knowledge about the branches of aviation. In order to realize our goals, we have brought together the four important disciplines of STEM education by associating the developing aviation industry and technologies of our country with Science and Mathematics courses.

Paper Universe

This year we have participated in the STEM Discovery Week as a part of the initiative of a few Scientix ambassadors from the South of Serbia, called NiSTEAM. We held workshops and had some fun and engaging activities in 5 schools during this week.

In Maths lessons in our school, we are trying to teach about geometry in an interesting way and we always want to apply that knowledge, so students can see why is that useful. They like especially all activities that are connecting their knowledge with real life. Ways that we can connect maths with other subjects are limitless.

For this STEM Discovery Week, we wanted to connect math with geography and make a Universe using geometry objects made of paper and cardboard.

Teach coding with Scientix

In the last decade, there have been intense efforts to integrate STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) at all levels of formal education. The goal of this effort is to make teachers adopt modern pedagogical methods in the teaching process of Science and the cross-thematic approach which helps students to develop their skills. In particular, through New Technologies, one of the objectives is to introduce computational thinking into education as a “basic skill” to be acquired by all and not just by those involved in Computer Science. Besides “Reading, writing, numeracy, our goal must be to add computational thinking to each child’s analytical capability … as it is directly linked to the problem solving ability and the understanding of human behavior “(Wing, 2006: 33).

Based on this data, Vasileia and Ralia (Scientix ambassadors) decided to implement a 2-hour workshop for primary school teachers. This 2h interactive workshop took place during “Athens Science Festival 2019”, on Friday 5^th April 2019. Primary school teachers, beginners but willing to introduce coding to their students, using resources from the Scientix Portal and other platforms, were invited. As the event was held during a Science Festival many adults and children dropped over to take a look. They were also informed about STEM discovery Week, the Scientix portal and the teaching resources it provides and about plugged and unplugged coding activities.

Let’s build a house not shaken by an earthquake!

My name is Elena Vladescu, I am Scientix Ambassador for Romania and on 14.04.2019, I organized the activity “Let’s build a house not shaken by an earthquake!”.

This was a practical activity for 17 years old students for constructing a mock-up of an earthquake resistant building. I used Scientix resources in order to make a more interesting and attractive activity for my pupils to practice what they learn. The main Scientix resouce used was Constructing Earthquake-Proof Buildings – Student Worksheet For Upper Secondary Education available here:

http://www.scientix.eu/resources/details?resourceId=11441

I used also Crossword Puzzle On Seismology – Student Worksheet For Upper Secondary Education from here

http://www.scientix.eu/resources/details?resourceId=11439

and ERIS Educational Package “Physics Of Earthquakes – Extended” from here http://www.scientix.eu/resources/details?resourceId=21445.