Transcript

STEM engagement for students in a Makerspace | Phil Carew & Liana Gooch | TEDxRosalindParkED

start our session by getting you to use your imagination as we commence altitude unit picture this a small drone floats over a series of buildings in the skull and as it does it sends back a series of images to a group of year two students who are studying the concept of location is that same drone starts to descend towards one particular building you start to hear the excited squeals of prep students who are learning the basics of coding using a series of very simple robotic devices as that drone goes towards one room in that building you start to heal the beautiful gentle hum of the 3d printers as they churn off these amazing innovations from a group of year-seven future thinking students we're just hoping that that particular items going to be the next big thing as you look into that window and you'd look towards the floor you can see how do I rate students faces deep and concentration as they grapple with the physics challenge using a robotic ball known as the Spiro ball for a young girl growing up in the 1980s in New Zealand all of us would have seemed like science fiction but for our students at turret College this is a typical of their learning experience every day in our digital makerspace which we fondly call the dizzies own I have two young nieces one in primary school and one in kindergarten and my nieces have had very different experiences with technology when compared to a little Liana growing up in New Zealand in the 80s and myself growing up in the 90s my nieces and our students have technology right at their fingertips literally in their hands as they play on their tablets or devices making a movie or using Minecraft or coding I think what's really exciting for our students is the ability and the access to technology that they do have and so many opportunities that our students now have that we may not have had when we were in school a completed secondary school nine years ago and which isn't that long ago but I feel like the education landscape has changed quite dramatically and I'm sure some of you will agree with me you know range of ways but for me technology is a real key way in what has changed education in the last nine years when I was in school we used laptops or computers I max fight differently and now it's so much more than just that word processing students in our classes have laptops they're coding they're using CAD design they're on minecraft but it's actually in the classroom so there's that I think really that nice infusion between the technology and then developing those skills but then also supporting the teaching and learning in the class I often ask my students especially at a year seven level which is quite fun so try this if you haven't already asked them to imagine what they think our technology will look like in 20 years for me I like to imagine maybe robots will be roaming the streets with us or cars will be flying above I think the exciting thing is is that we don't actually know if that will happen or not maybe not in 20 years but one day but I think what's really exciting is technology is as we are aware rapidly changing changing so fast we don't know what's next already we have self-driving cars we've got 3d printers printing prosthetic hands so I think for us to get our students engaged with this and the digital tools and technologies is really really vital so where did the impetus for stem really come from well when we started our journey back in 2014 we just read a report from Professor Ian Chubb with his recommendations and the fields related to stem to the government so highlighting what it was that what's required to take an Australia further to be competitive in the world and there was one particular statistic that really resonated with us the fact that at least 75% of future jobs were require steam thinking and skills for us that really had a note because it was like the fact that we needed to do something now and not wait coupled with that was the work that we conducted with David Price from the UK innovation unit really looking at what what really engages our modern learners and what we discovered is that the students that we have in our classrooms are doing it now they're not waiting for us as teachers to to to deliver that curriculum and they've got the digital devices at their fingertips in order to do that so do it themselves and they'll also prepare to collaborate and let's face it they're working on that digital realm so we've spent a lot of time doing extensive research and from that we decided we weren't just going to focus on stem and those separate silos of science technology engineering and math Smith and mathematics we're going to infuse it across all of our subjects when you look at those particular skills those soft skills that they'll need to take in to the world of employment collaboration we're going to have to work in teams they're going to have to be creative they're not only going to have to solve problems they're gonna have to find those problems out and they're going to have to really be good at designing so all of those elements were going to end up and depend all of our subjects so once that we still and I had really acquired those skills and knowledge ourselves it came time to really inform our staff so at the start of last year we spent extensive time really underpinning what it meant to explore stem and what the journey would be what will journey would be taking as we prepared them for our DG makerspace once we launched our space in July last year it became important to really inform our other stakeholders in the learning process our learners their students and of course our parents as you can see this is a digit own acronym we are educators so I apologize I love an acronym as most of us do and our Dizzy's iron has four key elements of it we want to design innovate gamify and inspire last year we gave our students the opportunity to name the space as you can imagine there was some very creative and interesting names but we would like to thank Sophia because she actually came up with the name the innovation zone we loved the design aspect and of course the innovation as well so we had to think about that the tools that we were using in the space and at that moment it was really just digital tools so we were a little bit creative took that digi and we're able to make that acronym with the four key principles for us so without dizzy zone it's a separate space in the school we have a separate room and we like to encourage our students to think of it as a bit of a sign so it's a different space it's different to their learning environment I am casually say come on let's get in the zone in design and as I hold for your applause like I do with my students it never really happens but I just haven't you haven't really learned to stop I love it personally I think it will catch on maybe hashtags design in the design maybe our Dizzy's iearnt is our digital epicenter so it's where all of our digital tools are stored but in that case it's not Sam it's not just a case of the students and the classes coming into there we do go into other rooms as well it's just where we have that that space so our students know where they can go to explore and tinker really when we're looking at our did use own we want to we really celebrate success of course we all celebrate success but we really celebrate the failure as well and we think our students need to know about failure and they need to become resilient to know with that failure then what can they do they can redesign they can rebuild and they can rethink rethink the practices that they're going through in this space as well we think it's really important to prototype so we have students sketching an idea and then from that sketch they might move over to the Lego table or use some plasticine to build that prototype then from there they might go over to the computers the Mac or PC lab and they will design on some CAD software such as Sketchup and then do the full cycle to the 3d printers in the space we do really focus on the design process and the iterative design process our makerspace is a has traditional elements but then a lot of digital elements as well so we have 3d printers and robotics but then we also have our plasticine and cardboard and scissors and glue so we have a few different elements for our students to tinker with so let's go back to that original group of year 8 students we saw Breitling on the floor that does physics challenge and what stage of the development are they with their digital technology fulfill and I we started by looking at the Australian Curriculum for digital technology and decided that we needed to create a series of identities to which to anchor the skills and knowledge that so that all of our school community but could could become acquainted with those hence we developed the digi identities so I'm going to take you through some of those now let's start with the initial stage these are our did BOTS this is really important because this is where we're developing the mindset that students can realize they can be engineers they can be builders they can be designers so we spend a lot of time working with games and also some basic devices like the bee BOTS for example to build the initial stages of coding from there we move up to the next stage where you'll see for example our digi explorers a year three to four they're starting to get into more basic levels of design they're finding problems is starting to do problem solving as well and we spend a lot of time in the platform of Minecraft and can I tell you the excitement the buzz that happens in our digi so when you see a group of students all of different levels are minecraft teaching each other and it's a real excitement remember we're coming back to that student engagement by the time we get up to year 5 as the name suggests we're getting into engineering our Digitas we're doing a lot more sophisticated on construction they're working a lot more in collaborative groups and we're working with robotics they're working on CAD really designing online and then they're producing their items on the 3d printers and we're really exploring now electronics by the time we get up to you 9 and 10 is the realization that it won't be enough for our students in the future to simply innovate they're going to have to be able to promote these goods and as I said earlier some of them will have to create their own jobs so entrepreneurship is going to be critical for the future by the time our students reach up to VCE level years living in 12 they're starting to specialize in a particular vein and stem so as the name suggests they stand to think about where they're going to take themselves into the future so as feel a nice reflective why is it that we've been able to gain such major momentum over the last eight months since our launch of the Digi zone and we've come up with some major steps so if you are suggesting a firm you do think that you would like to go into this round there's some really good points to take from this next stage first of all do extensive research we spend a lot of time online we went out to universities we went on school visits to sort of see what other schools were doing with their maker spaces and how that could apply in our own context and what we discovered is that we needed that extra expertise in our schools so what we did is that we created a role called the digital integration and ICT Support Officer now can I tell you this technician the fill work will agree has the best job in the school imagine being able to tinker to explore to trial some of these a major amazing and digital tools that are out there and they're missing this us Wrigley through the day what they've been looking at so it's an amazing role and this person prior to a teacher coming into the dizzies own work with a teacher to determine okay what are the key curriculum links and then one of the skills that you'll require to support your students in that space and can I tell you about the buzz that you see when you see the whole mess faculty working with this technician and with the other experts talking about teaching linear equations using robotics or the buzz the other day when a years even teachers working with Julie and our technician about teaching what was a measurement using minecraft's now that's something we haven't seen before so we're really excited about that so how do you tap in for your school community with that excitement the first thing I'd say is that you need to tap into your early adopters those people all who will really have an amazing passion for those digital tools and that's exactly what we did so we have a couple of voluntary nights where people can come along and have some wine and cheese and play and tinker with some of the tools that we had in our under G so we had things like going on like wine crafts we had CAD and then what those people could then do was to go back into their classrooms and trial those and then we had regular teach meets and professional loonie updates where they could in front of all of the school teachers demonstrate what they were doing and suddenly we start to see that excitement of fused through other people and they were going hey I can do that too show me how from there became it became really important to share the links and new resources that we were discovering so we created a Google Doc which became a repository for all our resources so that we kept that that momentum going on throughout the month we brought in our current body so we made sure that we had evenings where people could sort of understand where we were coming from and there's an amazing amount of expertise out there we really wanted to emphasize that we didn't want to be a separate silo from industry it's it it's critical that we interface because we don't always have the expertise out there and you'd be amazed at what your community has going on out there that you can tap into this year to keep the momentum going all of our year five to nine teachers are presently working working on at least one instance of using a digital tool and their programs so it's been quite exciting to see how that's for going and where we're going next you can see in the middle for our parents and engagement we have again another acronym I apologize our BYOD C evening so that's your bring your own device and child so we've set these up to engage our parent community so of course it's really important to engage the students and the staff but also to engage the community the outer community but then the parents as well so we've heard the sessions we've had a number of Minecraft CAD robotics sessions with our parents but then so yeah how this would work is they would come in after school and they would design with their with their children so I ran a session an introduction to 3d printing last year and a little CAD design challenge at the end of last year so the parents came in with their children and they had their laptop I introduced the design process and gave them just a small design challenge so they had about 15 minutes to design and sketch your product and then from there I introduced them to some basic Sketchup tools and then they were able to actually design themselves personally I really think I don't know about you but it could be a really good idea for a reality a reality TV show to have parents and students kind of battling out against other parents and students I envision this kind of arena with easels and laptops and I don't know some other technologies there but I think having those armed the parents get a little bit competitive with the students as well was was quite interesting I really strongly encouraged engaging your parent community and running some hands-on workshops it's great to have our parents come to the school to hear some presentations but to do that hands-on workshop and then to also have the students show it hey mom dad this is what I can it's really really rewarding now remember that our students won't wait for it to happen in the classroom and there's all sorts of amazing things happening out there so we wanted our students to be able to pursue their patience outside as well so we created the digi quest program which operates an after school and also in holiday time and this is where they get to do amazing things like Minecraft care at the moment our group of digit futurists are working with a renowned architect to build structures and the struts that they're producing will be printed off on industrial level 3d printers so they're quite excited about that next term we've got a group of engineers and coming out to provide authentic problems for the students to really grapple with and so it's really about making sure that this is real life learning and we've got some other things in the pipeline as well just a few more other I guess tips as well for I guess setting up a space like this is that we've all been looking in for inter industry industry connections and also pipelines into universities as well so not just for our students but also for our staff we really want the digital to complement the stem thinking within the school but then also to have a little look into our entrepreneurial skills as well really primarily fully honoring our we want our students to have fun and we want them to be engaged so we want to continue researching innovative technology but then we really just want this technology to further support the teaching and learning at our school so I gave something up as we reflect back on our journey so far and remember it's only been eight months and since we launched it in eight months prior to that we did our research do your homework don't think you can just walk into a digit space and it's going to happen overnight you have to do extensive research really think about what expertise you need to bring into the school so that you've always got that high level I'm available to your students and your teachers to upskill them make sure that you're tapping into your parent body but also really think carefully about the feedback that your staff of providing for you at the start this year we were eight we were able to run digi day now based on the feedback on what skills our teachers wanted to pursue we were able to bring in experts from outside to really look at I'd like to apply for this year it's also important of course to listen to your students and that student voice to determine what your programs are going to look like well of course really increase that student engagement so I want to take you back to those original students that we heard about when we were on the drones and images it's 10 to 15 years into the future some of those students are going into university some are aspiring entrepreneurs who have just created their own businesses or the engineers their designers their innovators you know what it doesn't matter what field our students are going into because ultimately they're going to apply those valuable Digi skills that they've acquired at school we know that they're going to be effective communicators they can compete with other people in the world they can collaborate really well in teams and these students know that it doesn't matter if they make a mistake or they fail as long as they failsafe that this is a vital step on the pathway to success so for further knive we know that the work that we're doing now in the digits pace is really future proofing our students for whatever challenges that they may face as they move forward thank you