Me with me--Making STEAM Episodes

In this series of hangouts, educators participating in the Intersections project met digitally to engage in a make-experience together. Each video consists of a brief overview of the make, and then time spent making and talking, as educators discuss what they learn through the process and how such a project might play out in their classroom.

Making STEAM Episode 1: Interdisciplinary Learning through Cardboard Cities

Making STEAM Episode 2: Boundaries in STEAM with Stopmotion Video

Making STEAM Episode 3: The Science of Translation through a Textile Make

Make with me--Making STEAM Episode series

In this series of hangouts, educators participating in the Intersections project met digitally to engage in a make-experience together. Each video consists of a brief overview of the make, and then time spent making and talking, as educators discuss what they learn through the process and how such a project might play out in their classroom.

Making STEAM Episode 1: Interdisciplinary Learning through Cardboard Cities

Making STEAM Episode 2: Boundaries in STEAM with Stopmotion Video

Making STEAM Episode 3: The Science of Translation through a Textile Make

Supporting student dialogue in our online community of makers

The Intersections Charlotte project brought together students and teachers from different area schools with Educators from Discovery Place to engage in student-driven make-based work at  each

of the respective sites. The Making STEAM Google+ community was born out of the necessity to to keep all parties connected through the entire process. It was a place for students to post not just their finished makes, but also work in progress, reflections, and responses to the ideas of others. It was a place for sharing, for conversation, and for inspiration.

While students were familiar with operating in social networks in their own lives, there was a bit of a learning curve (for both students and teachers) in discovering how to make this site work in a way that both invited students ownership and and rich feedback on student work. Hitting the +1 button or leaving a comment like “good job” doesn’t give the maker much insight into how his or her production worked in the mind of of the person who was viewing it. This sort of feedback required students to have some specific ways of responding that were open-ended, promoted a conversation, and developed scientific habits of mind that are cultivated through conversation and iteration.

As much as making isn’t a fill-in-the blank sort of venture, having some frames for students to refer back to when responding helped to get them feeling what it was like to see their comments as an important part of a conversation.

Here is a slide Steve used in his class during time set aside for reading and responding to the work in the community:

Below is a a post made by Levar showing a stop motion video he created inspired by the Hunger Games, but taking place in a setting he made from cardboard character that were repurposed army figurines:

The post elicited 19 comments where viewers and LeVar exchanged ideas. Here is a piece of that conversation:

In this conversation that includes students, LeVar’s teacher Steve, and Robert from Discovery place, the feedback posed prompted LeVar to clarify and even provided ideas for future interactions. It all worked to bring in other people as thinking partners and keep LeVar moving forward in his own process.

Making across content, composing cardboard cities

Cardboard is the ultimate make material. It’s cheap (or FREE...there’s usually plenty of it piled by the recycling bin behind any school), sturdy, and relatively easy to work with if you have a good cutting tool and some tape or glue. This post tells how a language arts and science teacher collaborated to create a make-based learning experience inspired by content in both of their classes and built with…..cardboard!

For this make, students drew upon the setting and novels they were reading in language arts and their learning about sustainability in science class to construct cardboard cities.  For language arts, students participating in books clubs, where students read in small groups a novel with a group of their classmates and regularly completed literacy-related mini-lessons and group discussions.  The novels, 20 or so in all, spanned in genre from biography to dystopian fiction, but fit thematically into the unit being taught, which focused on responding to injustice.  

In science, Tiffany was teaching an earth science unit on natural resources, with content and discussions focused on constructing a conceptual understanding of sustainability in the world today. The setting and events of the novels would serve as starting places for the cites’ construction, and the decisions students made while constructing them would be made through the lense of sustainability.  

City planning and hacking the school day

Students in one of Steve’s classes (perhaps considering what they had learned about sustainability with Tiffany) raised the concern that there would not be enough space for 20 cardboard cities to be built and suggested that groups build collaboratively. With a bit more discussion and negotiation, both the teachers and students settled on the idea that groups would add to one of four cities depending on the time period their novel took place, thus giving rise to the Historic City, Modern Urban City, Modern Suburban City, and Future City.  

In planning how to organize this make, Steve and Tiffany (as well as their students) felt like one hour a day was nowhere near enough to really dig into a make, and Steve and Tiffany wanted the make to be inspired by more than just a single entry point from their class content; rather, they hoped to see what students made and the content of their classes serve complementary purposes that deepened over a period of time. The solution they decided on was a make that took place over the course of five weeks, with one day per week being devoted to making.  On this day, during the time that students had ELA and Science, they would go to the room where their city in progress was located. Two were in Tiffany’s room, and two were in Steve’s.

Supporting the making and iterative process

Sometimes students would continue right where the left off, but other times students would consider the new events that they had encountered in their novels or new concepts that had been introduced in science during the week since they had last worked on the structure and use this knowledge to revise what they had been working on.  It wasn’t just the new content students had to consider, though. Steve and Tiffany introduced new materials and possibilities into the makerspace each week. The foundational materials students needed to construct (cardboard, scissors, glue) were always on hand, but over the course of the make students also were invited to paint, add working circuits to light LEDs, and also to use their cities as settings for stop motion videos.

Read more about the project and what students thought about it in the article from a local newspaper below: