Resources for teaching a STEM elective course?

July 17, 2015 2:54 PM

So the school year is close to starting here and I was recently told I need to teach a STEM elective course. This is a brand new course and there are no real guidelines so I need to build it from the ground up. I have some ideas but I need to quickly find ways to get material resources most of all, but also a strategy to plan a cohesive year-long course.

This elective is for grades 6-8. On top of this course I'm teaching 7th and 8th grade science, 9th grade chemistry and 10th grade advanced chemistry. Also going to graduate school to get my masters. So yeah...

I have a very well equipped chemistry lab with all sorts of nice glassware and chemicals. Since this course needs to encompass STEM in a nice tidy package I don't think the materials I have will be of much use overall.

Of course I can request the school to buy materials but they aren't exactly going to sign off on a bunch of lego robot kits or whatever. I am also dead broke, getting paid very close to minimum wage so I'm not going to dig into my salary much for this.

So on top of going to school and planning out all of my other courses I need to quickly find a way to get materials (wiring, transistors, other misc electronic equipment, idk). I have a lot of random ideas from classes I've taught in the past at science camps and whatnot, but I also need a strategy for everything we do to fit into a cohesive lesson plan.

For some reason all I can think of is James Burke's Connections series but I'm not as clever as that dude. I'll of course ask for advice from the older science teacher when I finally meet him but for the most part this one is all on me. Help.

posted by WhitenoisE to Education (10 answers total)

How are you guys defining STEM here? I always interpreted it as anything including "science, technology, engineering, math", so very, very broad. But you seem to be interpreting it as robotics. Which is fine, but I would first try to determine whether it HAS to be a robotics course (with lots of material requirements) or not. If you're free to design the class within the broad STEM umbrela...

What's the socieo-economic profile of your school? My favorite memories of science class were lots of cool group experiments that involved plenty of at-home work, so the materials costs largely fell on families. Obviously that is more or less feasible depending on what your students' families can afford. Examples would be building a catapult and having to do all sorts of calculations about it, doing an egg drop and again doing a bunch of math associated with that, etc. Super fun. I could also see a fun class built around computer programming, web design, or something similar if you have access to a computer law and have that skill set. And, I could definitely see basing at least some units on cool chemistry stuff.

Basically, if you have freedom to design the course like you want, I would probably focus on just combining distinct units of cool science stuff (i.e. Chemistry Experiments! Light and Sound! Momentum!), with lots of hands on stuff and offloading materials costs to familes if possible. Since it's an elective, you don't have to worry about covering specific objectives, and at this age it's not like they're going to even remember most of the specifics anyway, so I would just focus on inspiring a love of cool science stuff and a sense of curiosity.
posted by rainbowbrite at 3:07 PM on July 17, 2015

Best answer: If you have access to computers, there's a lot of good stuff out there for introducing kids to programming, even kids in grades 6-8. In my school, we had a lot of success with the Hour of Code (www.code.org), and some of my students started in on the lessons at Code Academy. I also did a few lessons where we'd write programs that dealt with concepts the kids were learning in math, like determining whether three angles could be the angles of a triangle or finding the measures of complementary angles given their ratio.
posted by alphanerd at 3:25 PM on July 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I once again find myself raving about the awesome 4H Junk Drawer Robotics curriculum... It's really engineering, might be a little young for your crowd, but probably has some good ideas...
posted by straw at 3:27 PM on July 17, 2015

I teach high school Coding which is considered a STE(A)M class. I can give you more info if you want to go that route but it's basically starting with an Hour of Code, then Scratch, then either Khan Academy or Code Academy.
posted by kinetic at 3:35 PM on July 17, 2015

Best answer: Random ideas:
-I've had good luck using lesson plans from NOVA--they're pretty detailed on materials lists, introductory info and evaluation without a lot of extra brainpower. I used the Ghost Within Your Genes module and everyone loved it.
-At some point if they haven't done so before, get them to extract DNA! That's always a crowd pleaser with minimal ingredients (dish soap, rubbing alcohol, blender, meat tenderizer/pineapple juice).
-Another cheap/easy idea is a flower dissection. Kids that age are fascinated by the idea of flowers having both male and female parts.

As for coming up with an overall theme, the schools I've worked with all wanted to go in a biotechnology/medical technology direction. One approach might be to talk about a medical device (e.g. pacemaker, DNA Sequencer) and approach it from different angles (biology, medicine, engineering).

I teach college level bio and do a fair bit of K-12 outreach, so feel free to PM me if you'd like to chat about more ideas.
posted by estelahe at 3:52 PM on July 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

What you want is sphero robots. They teach coding and are crazy fun. If you can get the school to pay for them....
posted by guster4lovers at 5:02 PM on July 17, 2015

I teach 678 technology classes, and would be happy to talk curriculum. The vast majority of suggested I use is free and web based, I do have left robotics running but it's not something you have to do. I don't do a lot of choosing but I do use scratch as animation and video game design software. Message me if you want to talk.
posted by dstopps at 5:33 PM on July 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Do you have a union contract? Because I remember my mom protesting (somehow) when they tried to assign her more than three preps. It sounds like a totally unreasonable workload to me. (Husband also worked as a teacher for 5 years.)
posted by puddledork at 7:43 PM on July 17, 2015

A few years ago I finally got to write and teach my dream class, "Engineering for MacGyver." If you're comfortable with being a bit of a generalist I think it can be a pretty useful model. I basically worked in disconnected units, one in every discipline I was comfortable playing with. I can send you a syllabus if you want but I think it's pretty specific to my particular strengths. The general pattern was that, for every discipline, we did

* a useful thing to calculate
* a "sneaky trick" that actual engineers use
* a project to build

So for example, for aero engineering, we did power in flow (useful for calculating propellers, drag, etc), built soda bottle pressurized-air rockets, and talked about the unintuitive fact that your rocket flies farther if it's heavy in the nose (technically, if the center of mass is forward of the center of drag).

For mechanics we did mechanical advantage (calculating trading off force for distance), saw "the truss" as a sneaky trick, and built wire mechanisms a la Arthur Ganson.

It would also be cool to hang this off of the Burke framework - one of the problems building modern STEM stuff is that we're now in our second century of iterative improvement, so the core invention is really hard to see. But early industrial revolution stuff is much easier to build and understand.
posted by range at 6:22 AM on July 18, 2015

I should add that the pattern was usually (1) learn thing to calculate, (2) build something, (3) sneaky trick. Over the course of building, they would reliably either invent the sneaky trick by accident or analogy, or would build things that could be massively improved by using the sneaky trick.
posted by range at 6:25 AM on July 18, 2015