Scientix – STEM Discovery Week 2019

Family STEM Night

Why this activity

I organize STEM-themed family nights in our school once a month. As a Scientix Ambassador, these meetings become an excellent way to spread STEM education model to a wider community. Since the STEM Discovery Week takes place in April, I see this as a great opportunity to combine our Family STEM Night activity for April with STEM Discovery Week 2019. In our Family STEM Nights students, teachers and parents meet and they all work together to accomplish the challenges specifically designed for that night. For the STEM Discovery Week 2019, our main scope is to learn about the physics, math, engineering, architecture, design and technology behind geodesic domes and create one as a team..

Introduction

Our activity began with a short video to attract the participants’ attention. Then we discussed about different roof and ceiling structures through the history such as ancient Greek temples (Parthenon), Egyptian and Mayan pyramids. With this approach we learned more about why the domes are more practical, beneficial, convenient and functional. Many architects and engineers throughout the history like Da Vinci, Mimar Sinan and Buckminster Fuller tried to build large domes to demonstrate their immortal masterpieces. We also examined world-wide famous domes from history to our days like Hagia Sophia, Astrodome, Climatron. (here is the link for the slides)

Scientix Resource with Future Classroom Scenario

FCL is so inspirational for educators because it designed with the aim of gaining 21-century skills with 6 different learning zones. Many schools in Turkey are creating new learning environments. And all of these schools take inspiration from Future Classroom Lab (FCL). We have selected a lesson plan prepared as a FCL scenario from within Scientix Repository in order to give an idea to the schools that prepare new learning environments in our district. The name of the lesson plan is “ Growing plastic & new life for plastic Future Classroom Scenario” and we applied it in a school.

This scenario is part of the BLOOM School Box, which consists of a set of five Future Classroom Scenarios combining bioeconomy into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. In this way, we had data on which environments we need for STEM and inquiry-based learning. This lesson plan is prepared for students aged 11-18. There are articles, experiments, worksheets, video links and evaluation questions in the lesson plan.

Mystery Science

The main aim of the lessons was to motivate students to learn science by investigating mystery in Science in movies, literature and life. The idea was to set numerous interesting activities where students have to do research, use Internet and different online tools working in teams, sharing ideas, developing interest and attitudes towards science, making investigation and experimental researches, stimulating creative activity, gaining new experiences, in order to find that mysteries in movies, literature and life can be explained by science and how these can be integrated in different subjects.

Project-based Learning: students got tasks, problems to solve and they worked in teams. Students developed an inquiry-based learning projects. They had the opportunity to work with their friends in teams which improved their social skills, increased their creativity, built and encouraged their problem solving skills in a fun way, supported related role modelling, career aspirations and etc.

STEaM micro:bit

This workshop was held on April 25th at Primary school “Sreten Mladenovic Mika”, Nis, Serbia as a part of join activities within NiSTEaM initiative of Scientix Ambassadors from the city of Nis for taking part in SDW 2019. It is an introduction to coding and computer science by way of making and design, using the revolutionary new micro:bit micro controller board, and Microsoft’s easy and powerful MakeCode block-based coding environment. It is a project-based curriculum with a maker philosophy at its core; the idea is that by making physical objects, students create a context for learning the coding and computer science concepts.

We found that existing curriculum for beginners focused mostly on solving math problems or constructing geometric shapes and that there was a certain type of student that signed up for computer science classes and these students were almost always boys. We wondered whether a different approach to teaching the basics of computer programming would be more engaging and also attract a larger variety of different types of students, both boys and girls.

Augmented Reality of Social Activities – STEM Discovery Week 2019.

A teacher asked students to solve a problem using technology. Students said that no one reads texts on school boards so they planned to add some interaction to school boards.

Research

Our students researched the ways to interact with photos and text on school boards. Then they came up with the idea of using augmented reality. They used some tools and chose ROAR tool to implement in this project.