Maker Education
As discussed in my Maker Philosophy, I believe making is a valuable tool to teach STEM concepts by allowing students to make personal connections to the content, elicit internal motivation for learning, and learn new skills to use beyond the walls of the classroom. This section includes units and lessons that I have implemented during my UTeach field experiences and internships that integrate philosophies and practices of making.
Showcase Unit: Making Sense of the Human Body
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Unit Overview
For my Maker Education showcase lesson, I had the opportunity to co-create a human body systems unit that deeply embedded making and the maker mindset to give students a platform to learn about their bodies and gain appreciation for what their bodies do on a regular basis. Over a five-week period, students learned about the human body systems through a series of hands-on and direct instruction lessons and ended with a two-week maker project. The first week of the maker project challenged pairs of students to make a personally meaningful product that demonstrated the main function of a given body system. The second week, students were paired in new groups and were given the task of creating a representation of the interactions of the two body systems that and involved an element of computer programming, or coding. The projects ended with class gallery walks to receive peer and teacher feedback, then students had the opportunity to make changes to the projects before a public gallery walk open to the NYOS and local community.
Maker Lesson: How Fast Can You React?
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First Iteration: Senior-Level Anatomy & Physiology
This maker lesson sequence was implemented over two, 90-minute class periods. On the first day, students were driven through an inquiry with the question, "How fast can you react?" They tested the speed of a voluntary motor output in reaction to three different stimuli: tactile, visual, and auditory. After trials of testing their reaction time, students graphed their results, concluding that there was a disparity between the reaction times to auditory and visual stimuli as compared to the faster tactile stimuli. The second lesson was driven by the students' intrigue in answering the question, "Why was there a difference in the reaction time?" In this lesson, students worked in groups to create a model of the nerve impulse pathway from the onset of a given stimuli (one of the three listed) to the voluntary motor output. Each group researched this pathway and the parts of the peripheral and central nervous systems that were involved in the process. Then the created a physical representation to show this pathway that they could present to others in the class. Once students completed their research and representations, they were paired with other groups to compare the pathways and infer the reasons for the disparity in reaction times before they were studied in depth in subsequent classes.
Second Iteration: 7th Grade Life Sciences
This iteration of the lesson was delivered over two, 50-minute class periods in a 7th grade class. Similar to the first iteration, students in the first day of the lesson tested their reaction time to auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli and graphed and discussed their results. In the second day, students created a paper circuit on a diagram of a human body. On this diagram, they mapped out the pathway that the nerve impulses traveled from the onset of the auditory or visual stimuli, to the voluntary motor output. Students labeled the afferent and efferent nerves and parts of the peripheral and central nervous systems. Students also drew parallels between the flow of electrons through the coper tape and the propagation of nerve impulses. The switch of the circuit that students created at the brain represented the choice in responding to received stimuli with a voluntary output. Comparison between the LED light glowing in response to the electrons flowing to it and the completion of a voluntary motor output were discussed as a class.
Maker Lesson: ARS Micro:bit Bots
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At the Ann Richard's School, the 7th grade STEM class created bots running off Micro:bits. These programmable computers served as the brains of the bots: governing movements, serving as a display, running programs that were coded in MakeCode.org, and communicating with each other via radio signal. With these functionalities, students created bots like a moving chicken that rolled and turned according to a remote control, made chicken noises, and even laid eggs on command. Other bots included designs like a bubble boat, a magic 8 ball, talking bunnies, and cars. I helped girls print components of their design using 3D printers, cut components using the laser cutter, and debug and streamline computer programs on MakeCode.org. This project challenged students to use computational thinking and makerspace construction skills to create a product that integrated the Micro:bits and motors to build their bot.
Maker Lesson: Investigating Integumentary Burns
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In this 90-minute lesson, students received models with layers that represented those of the skin. It was their job to read patient profiles and translate the damage that they read into the 3D model of the skin. Once students read the profiles and manipulated the models, they learned how to classify burns by the source of the burn and how deeply and severely the burn affected the layers of the skin. The groups then used their patient profile and model to help them classify the burn and post their model to the class table that would be reviewed with the group to learn about other burns.
Maker Unit: ARS 9th Grade Cornerstone
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As the makerspace intern for the Ann Richard's School for Young Women Leaders, I worked alongside the engineering and biomedical track students while they completed their Cornerstone Projects. The Cornerstone Projects are designed and executed within their STEM track classes to use their maker skills to demonstrate what they have learned over the year. The biomedical students researched the physiological mechanisms that govern the body's deterioration associated with different diseases to design nanodevices that could deliver medication or particles to combat the negative effects of the disease. The engineering students created products that could solve a community problem and had products ranging from a full-sized home for homeless women with children, to a low-water clothes washing machine with Arduino-based water sensors. The products were displayed at a community showcase with invited professionals so students could receive feedback to revise their design before the final presentations that happened within their classes.
Maker Lesson: The Cells & Me / Project Cell
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First Iteration: The Cells and Me, 2019
In the first iteration of this lesson, students were challenged to make a museum exhibit to teach others about plant and animal cells and their organelles. Students had the freedom to create their products in any way they wanted to meet the project requirements. Pictures shown above show student artifacts from the first iteration of this lesson.
Second Iteration: Project Cell, 2020
The second iteration of this project took place during my Apprentice Teaching semester. To read a full discussion of the lesson, please visit my AT Showcase Lesson Page!
Maker Unit: ARS Green Building Project
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The Green Building Project is a project-based, interdisciplinary unit for 6th grade students at the Ann Richard's School for Young Women Leaders. While serving as the makerspace intern for the school, I had the opportunity to assist students in the execution of their projects. The goal of the project was for students to create a scaled model of a sustainable, green school in a specific region in the world. Students used content and skills that they learned in their classes in order to create the final school product. For example, the students worked in their math class to explored how to create their models to scale, in science class they learned about renewable energy and how to calculate the efficiency of such systems, in social studies they studied the regions in which they were creating their school, and in P.E. they researched games and popular physical activities and played them as a group. This project spanned almost half of the spring semester, which was the longest and most integrated interdisciplinary PBI lesson I have seen to date. By my involvement in this project, I learned the importance of communication among teachers and the value of project-based instruction in creating authentic motivation for students.
Maker Lesson: Protect Your Pill
In my UTeach Preservice Teaching, Step 2, I developed and taught a lesson to introduce students to the Human Digestive System. In this lesson, students were challenged to accept the role of a pharmaceutical engineer that was testing pill coatings for their new drug. Students began by creating a "pill coating" out of their own combination of sugar, flour, and vegetable oil, then used it to cover their "pills," Skittles candies. Once the materials were prepared, it was time to test the coatings under different conditions that represented the chemical and mechanical digestion along the human GI tract. For example, mechanical digestion was represented by placing the coated pill into a clear plastic cup and stirred with a spoon, chemical digestion was represented by placing the coated pill into a cup of clear acidic soda. Then there was also a condition that combined both the mechanical and chemical representations, stirring and soda. By comparing the degradation of the pill coating under the various conditions, students built an understanding that both the mechanical and chemical means of digestion were equally important in the breakdown of food entering the system. This conclusion from the exploration lead to rich discussion about the main structures and functions of the digestive system. This lesson was implemented far before I was in UTeach Maker, but incorporates playfulness and gives students personal choice in developing their hands-on, maker-embodied experiment. The students were highly engaged by this lesson and the mentor teacher found it to be a great launching point and point of reference for their continued studies of the human organ systems. Check out the full lesson plan linked above!
Maker Lesson: Edible Intro to Plant & Animal Cells
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This lesson is an example of how I integrate principles of making into lessons that would otherwise just be days of taking notes. To introduce the organelles in plant and animal cells, each pair of students received a rectangle plate, a square plate, and a plate full of candies and snacks. As we worked through the notes that described each organelle, their function, and an analogy for their function, students were able to pick a food analogy to represent the cell part and add it to the plates. The rectangle plate was where they constructed their plant cell and the round one was for their animal cell. As we took the notes we discussed similarities and differences between the plant and animal cells.
Look at my Apprentice Teaching Lesson Plans that Incorporated Making HERE!
See how I integrated Making into my Distance Learning Plan HERE!