Sometimes the best STEM lesson is the one that doesn’t go according to plan.
At Saturday’s 901STEM workshop, our students took on the Stuffed Animal Tower Challenge: work as a team to design and build the tallest tower capable of supporting their new stuffed-animal teammate.
Before they started, we gave them two demonstrations.
My demonstration partner carefully built a tower designed to be strong and stable.
I built mine with a different goal: I wanted it to fail.
The idea was to show the students that engineers don’t always get things right the first time, and that failure isn’t the end of the engineering process. It’s information you use to make the next design better.
There was just one problem.
Her tower fell.
So, committed to the lesson, I used skills I never thought I had to balance Napoleon the Pig atop my tower.
It held.
For a precarious 10 second countdown, the tower held.
Apparently, I had accidentally discovered something else engineers know pretty well:
Strong foundations matter.
And that applies to more than towers.
Research supports the value of giving children positive STEM experiences early. Studies of elementary students have found that hands-on STEM experiences can significantly increase students’ awareness of and interest in STEM subjects and careers, while research on STEM outreach shows that even relatively brief experiences can increase excitement, knowledge, and STEM interest. (ERIC)
That’s why experiences like Saturday matter.
We’re not expecting an elementary student to decide what she wants to do for the rest of her life. We’re helping build the foundation: an opportunity to design something, build something, fail at something, improve something, and discover that STEM might be for her.
Sometimes that foundation becomes stronger than you planned.
I have the tower to prove it.
#901STEM #STEMEducation #HandsOnSTEM #Engineering #STEMForAll #GirlsInSTEM
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