Maker Faire Bay Area is just about a month away, taking place on May 22 and 23 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Every year, Maker Faire strives to inspire, educate, and entertain curious and creative learners of all ages. It celebrates arts, crafts, engineering, green design, food, music, science and technology and brings together communities […]
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This weekend I had an opportunity to attend a renewable energy workshop organized by the Southeastern Massachusetts Achievement and Retention in Technology group at Bristol Community College. The morning was packed with teachers sharing their lesson and unit ideas on ideas based around the STEM subjects of green technologies and energy.
The college offers a Lending Lab for tools and lab equipment that most schools are unlikely to stock. Through using these equipment resources, teachers can get their students’ hands onto enough materials to for a series of lessons on windmill design, hydrogen cars, air purity testing, and more. Teachers shared their experiences in bringing this equipment into their classes and how it affected student learning.
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Last week, at the annual MassTEC conference an interesting collection of science and technology teachers gathered to share experiences and information. Here are some highlights:
Johanna Bunn of the Boston Museum of Science introduced the Engineering the Future curriculum, with interactive demonstrations of hands-on projects introducing students to structures, fluids and electricity.
The forum on the Massachusetts state science and technology curriculum frameworks introduced a series of strand maps that show how the concepts and possible activities in the various STEM subjects interrelate. Their hope is that existing and new courses could be designed so that they step students through learning ideas within courses and how the courses could build upon each other. Right now the maps are static PDFs, but their goal is to have them be more interactive in the way they connect projects and concepts.
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