Great Barrington — Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s administration, along with the state’s STEM Advisory Council, dubbed the week of October 22-26 as STEM week, with the aim of inspiring students, especially at the middle and high school levels, to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fields of study later on. The lead curriculum provider for the week is nonprofit organization i2 Learning, based in New York, which provided both training and comprehensive packages of materials for educators.
I2 describes the week’s aims as “an immersive program that transforms middle schools into STEM learning labs. During STEM Week, regularly scheduled course periods are replaced by hands-on curriculum developed by MIT and a number of other leading STEM organizations. Over the five days, teachers and students work in teams to solve real-world problems in a classroom where hands-on experimentation, critical thinking, and collaboration are encouraged and used as teaching techniques to engage and inspire students.” This year over 60 public schools in Boston and the city of Newark, New Jersey, are participating, among several other Massachusetts cities.
Two Berkshire County schools have also fully embraced the imperative for the first time this year. To that end, teachers put aside all other subjects and schedules this past week to make room for a STEM immersion experience. The 5th through 8th graders at Monument Valley Regional Middle School studied one subject area in depth, and on Friday morning invited parents in to check out what they’d learned. Richmond Consolidated School similarly participated.
Fifth graders at Monument Valley studied the biology and challenges of wetlands, through the lens of “Mystery at Loon Lake.” For one activity, using dried beans, marbles and ping-pong balls, students learned about the problem of bycatch fishing, whereby undesired marine species are caught in nets meant for others. Students attempted to solve that problem by constructing paper cups with holes and baffles to prevent the smaller beans (representing unwanted by-products like shrimp and squid) from getting caught, as well as the dolphins (ping-pong balls) from getting in. Tuna (marbles) were what they were after. Students tracked the success of their catches over five trials.
Science teacher Diane Arnold decided to supplement the materials and curriculum for a lesson on biomagnification with student-designed charts of the food chain of Loon Lake, to help them visualize the concept of 10 prey feed one predator. In this class’s case, the predator was a duck. Arnold appreciates how the week has augmented her ongoing work. “We were doing a unit on living systems before, so we went over food webs and by the time we started this unit they had a lot of background. Next week, we will start taking their hypotheses they came up with this week and showing with their evidence how they came up with the hypotheses. This is great, I’m going to keep all of it up. That will be fun for me to take this further.”
Sixth-graders created lunar colonies. Students Grayson Beacco and Sam St. Peter showed off the spacesuits they’d made for the citizens of their colony, oversized marshmallows. The most interesting facts they learned, they said, related to water on the moon. They learned that the moon does have water, but it’s hard to find, and only located at the two poles. At a nearby table, Olivia Ostrander offered visitors a tour of her group’s solar colony-scape, which featured a sandy and gravel surface, with foam air and water filter hooked up to houses and gardens. There were domes over the gardens because “the [air] pressure would ruin them, if they were very exposed…eventually, I’m hoping to have an enclosure, and we can open these up, so there’s not oxygen tubes, but flowing water.” At which point Assistant Principal Miles Wheat commented to Olivia, “So you have stages in mind? This is the initial stage, and there’s more construction to go?” Students will take their colonies home, but clearly some students plan to continue working on them independently.
Seventh graders studied kinetic sculpture, and I walked into a room abuzz with kids creating a lot of kinetic energy of their own, so excited were they testing out the two tracks they’d developed. Track number one was ready for trial with a marble set to head down a chute.
“Are you ready?”
“It’s going!”
“Here we go, here we go!”
The marble made its way down a long track of construction paper tubes snaking their way from ceiling to floor, then hitting lines of dominoes, knocking over books, flipping on a fan, which set off another fan to turn on, which set off a sensor that had been programmed to play music. The marble on this track needed a couple of human pushes along the way. Track number two — perhaps because the marble passed down a steeper track — had no such trouble, and knocked over its line of rainbow colored dominoes to loud cheers and hoots.
The eighth-grade unit was on surgery, where at the entrance to one classroom Victoria Pevzner and Samantha Goudey instructed visitors on how neurons send and receive information from the brain to the body, using tic tacs for brain-to-hand grabbing demonstrations. Samantha loved learning how surgeons have to wash their hands, which process takes a full five minutes and involves hard scrubbing up to the elbow, and between each finger.
There was some disagreement over the preferred activities of the week in the surgery room. Many kids loved dissecting a (real) sheep’s brain, sticking their fingers between the occipital lobe and cerebellum, but others objected to the strong chemical smell. Others raved about practicing lumpectomies, and others about setting broken bones, which involved pencils instead of animals. Several more were passionate about suturing, which they’d practiced on the lacerated muscles of a raw chicken leg.
They’d been taught by an expert in the field on Thursday when parent and local orthopedist Mark Sprague, of Berkshire Orthopaedics Associates, came in to demonstrate techniques. He and wife Cory Sprague have twins in the eighth grade, and it is Corey’s work on i2 Learning’s summer camp component that brought the organization into Berkshire County. She says that the Boston schools, which are in their third year’s collaboration with i2, have expanded the STEM week to a month, which includes interdisciplinary work with English Language Arts. “The mission has always been to get the program into as many schools as possible, and into the school week. Once they’d gotten into schools, I made it my mission to get it here. It’s powerful. Every Boston school has signed on to do it another year.” The hope is that the week’s STEM immersion focus will expand to more and more schools in coming years.
At the sheep brain station, eighth-grader Prem Mahida passionately explained the tasks assigned to each part of the brain, being sure to mention that the frontal lobe controls thoughts and memories, and is not fully developed in young people until they are twenty-five. “That’s why they don’t make the best decisions sometimes.” He said that a lot of kids were inspired to go into surgery based on the fun they had suturing.
“Now I really want to be a dermatologist,” he said.
