What Do We Value As A Community?

This week we began our next STEAM unit that focuses on Global Goal #11, Sustainable Cities and Communities.  The students were thrilled to hear that we are going to be designing grade-level towns using Minecraft!  There was a lot of excitement (and even a little bit of flossing)!

The essential questions we are asking ourselves in this unit are If we could build an ideal city, what would be the master plan?  What is important today? What do we value?  Everyone agrees that we value the Global Goals, so we figured there would be no better way to brainstorm a list of what we would need in our ideal city than to use the Global Goal grid as a foundation.  We created a list of buildings and resources such as a hospital, a school, green spaces, clean water, renewable energy sources, and then asked the students to figure out which community asset ties in with which Global Goal.  They were amazingly astute!

We talked about their roles as town planners, and what town planners do.  Students in K-2 watched a fun YouTube video describing the role town planners play in community development, and third through fifth graders had the opportunity to meet a local town planner herself, Paige Greenfield from Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission in Woodstock, Vermont.  She talked to the students about the forethought and design thinking that is involved when making decisions for a community, from ideas such as accessibility for all to food sources and waste management.  It was a fantastic discussion, and the students now have a much more solid understanding in their role as town planners of their Minecraft community.

Making thoughtful decisions that are going to have a larger impact on their community and potentially the world is an important part of being a 21st century learner and global citizen.  Next week, students will create their own rubrics for this unit and establish behavioral expectations and norms in their cyber world, a perfect opportunity to discuss digital citizenship.  This STEAM unit is going to get kids thinking and excited about design thinking like never before!

No Point Going Halfway!

It's 2019 and we're not slowing down on our commitment to the Global Goals here in STEAM, nor on the amazing learning that is happening when we combine real world problems with technology and collaboration!  Just like the Global Goals, we're not stopping halfway!

The Global Goals - No Point Going Halfway from FGREAT STUDIO on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for more information on our awesome upcoming unit!

Reflection

This week our students were finally able to see what Nepalese farmers really do to solve their tomato challenge.  They created a gravity ropeway that uses the weight of the produce and the incline of the mountain to bring the tomatoes to market without having to use any external energy at all!  Check out this video to see it in action!

After watching these videos, the students had the opportunity to engineer with the many STEAMy toys here in the library, or to create art at an art table. The adults in the room talked to students individually about their successes in this challenge using Hartford's Transferable Skills Critical Thinking & Problem Solving rubric.  It was so great to be able to reflect on student learning with the students one-on-one!

While they waited, the students showed off their engineering and artistic brains!

Taking the time to reflect with students about their thinking and their designs is an incredibly insightful learning tool.  We can't wait to share all this information with the classroom teachers!

Getting Our Tomatoes To Market!

What an AMAZING day of learning for our OQS Engineers!  Last week, after months of preparation, our students went out into the forest to test the prototypes of their solutions to the Practical Action Squashed Tomato challenge!

Students had to keep the principles, observations, and people involved in the problem in mind throughout the design process to be successful.  We continued to bring them back to the ideas we gathered using our Innovator's Compass before we started building back in October!

Let's see how successful they were!

We went out into the woods of our very own Tools Trail to test their designs in a setting similar to that which the farmers of Nepal live.  We couldn't do anything about the snow!

We had a rope already set up for any student who wanted to simulate a zipline.  Other than that, all of the innovation was up to them!