Understanding Your Audience Needs
As you watch the skill video below, think about these questions:
- How does Jean and her staff “set the children up for success?”
- Why is it important to try out the activity and materials before hand?
- How might selecting appropriate materials impact youth learning?
Now that you’ve watched the video, reflect on what you saw and post your responses.
- Why do you think it’s important to select appropriate materials when doing STEM?
- What examples of types of materials did you see were especially successful with youth? How could you tell?
Explore Engineering Practices
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Making Meaning from STEM Learning
To make STEM experiences meaningful, youth need to make the STEM learning personal. Staff use “provocations” and “plussing” to challenge youth to think of new ideas based on what they have discovered while creating an object that can fly out of a wind tunnel.
Video
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Linking My Experiences to Societal Needs
Watch as Gauri, the frontline staff member, helps the youth connect the activity to prior knowledge, experiences and societal needs and strategize how you might do this as well.
Video
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Developing Engineering Identity While Designing Cookie Packaging
See how an experienced educator identifies and demonstrates explicit strategies to support youth in developing their identity as engineers during an engineering design activity where youth create packaging to keep cookies from being broken.