Hold On to Your Hat, Linton-Stockton STEM Projects may Blow the Roof Off of this Place!
Susan Anderson, Academic Program Coordinator presented at the board meeting on Monday, January 16th and she shared some present and upcoming STEM projects.
Student Lead Student Professional Development:
Fifth-grade students previously created unboxing videos of all the resources we have available in the Flex Lab. Now they are taking it to the next level by providing instruction to our elementary students on how to use the items in the Flex Lab. In the upcoming months, 5th graders will be leading instruction to other students in the elementary on how to use the materials/resources. This will allow fifth graders to practice and demonstrate all 6 Graduate Profiles and teach our younger students the proper way to use the items.
K-3 Monarch Project:
Kindergarten, first, second, and third-grade students will be creating a Happy Monarch Space on the Linton-Stockton Campus with the help of high school students who are participating in the Landscape Design class.
As the Monarch populations decrease interest groups have begun revitalization projects to help save the Monarchs. Our students enjoy seeing and studying the life cycle of a Monarch and are very interested in helping our insect friends build their population back to how it should be.
Students have been dissecting milkweed plants and collecting seeds to plant in their gardens. They have also inspected locations they feel would be the best place for this garden and designed the types of gardens they would like to build. High school students evaluated their designs, drew them to scale, and provided a cost analysis of each garden. Once the garden design has been chosen elementary students with the help of high school students will begin the process of building and then planting the garden.
A project like this takes support from our school and community. We have built some great partnerships with our community. Friends of the Goose Pond, Miner Monarch Club, and Julie Corbin have all been very involved in this project. This project would not be possible without their support. Thank you for your support with this project.
All American Soap Box Derby
Fourth Grade students are going to get the opportunity to participate in the All-American Soap Box Derby at Linton-Stockton. This project will coordinate with the Indianapolis 500 Indiana history unit fourth-grade studies. Now we are bumping it up a level from going to the track, seeing the cars run, and learning the history of the track at the 500 race to now engineering and designing our own race cars. The All-American Soap Box Derby includes many academic standards in physical science, engineering, technology, mathematics, and the arts. Their mission includes building knowledge and character, creating meaningful experiences, innovation, collaboration, fair and honest competition, creating, problem-solving, developing solutions, and evaluating solutions. This event includes many skills needed to be successful in life.
We want to thank our community partners Boston Scientific and Duke Energy for sponsoring this experience for our students.
Dream Machine:
Dream Machine is a second-grade project that is already in the works. Students were assigned a task to identify a problem and design a dream machine. Students began this task with a Dream Machine Kickoff. Staff from Indiana University came to LSE and spent a day with them and provided a STEM activity for them to better understand the process needed to design and build a dream machine. Next, all students designed a machine on paper, classes then voted on the best design from their class and then went back and worked as teams to make updates and changes to increase productivity. Students created videos to explain the winning designs and presented them to the My Machine Team. High school students from Michigan and college students from Indiana University are going to take the students' designs and begin to work on prototypes and eventually build a real-life version of their dream machine.
The five dream machines are The Dog Feet Washer, The Toast Grabber, The Robot Helper (who helps kids do the math when their parents are sick), Kenneth 4000 (a robot that picks up trash), and The Sick Helper.
We want to thank our partners that have helped us with this project: Jon Racek, Indiana University, and Quincy Miller High School, Michigan.
Now you can see why you may need to hold onto your hat because students and staff at Linton- Stockton are doing amazing things! They continue to find ways to make learning relevant and rigorous in a fun way that could blow the roof off of this place.