Nanyang Girls High School
At Nanyang Girls’ High School, I transformed the school’s original Makerspace, redesigning the space, resources, and learning experiences to support dynamic project-based learning. After three years of teaching and learning alongside students and faculty, I was invited to design a brand-new Makerspace from the ground up, incorporating what I had learned with my vision for an evolving Maker-centered environment.
As a Maker Education STEM/STEAM Curriculum Specialist, I developed interdisciplinary, project-based learning experiences, collaborated with teachers across disciplines, and designed professional development for teaching and support staff. I also developed and led a 14-week Micro:bit Maker Program.
STEAM Integrated Learning
As our world continues to collaborate beyond borders, academic disciplines find expanded meaning through the Arts and Making. The Arts provide historical documentation of our political, sociological, economic, and cultural transformation through time and space. Our fashion, music, food, literature, entertainment, and architecture are left behind for the future to call “history”. These dispositions of who we are in this moment represent us collectively as a culture and cumulatively as a civilization. We know about life in ancient civilizations because of the artifacts left behind, the Arts and the Facts.
STEAM education is like cooking; using all your spices at once can muddle the taste. So, when developing a multidisciplinary experience, I only combine complementary disciplines that will elevate the content. Below, I share three recent STEAM experiences I have enjoyed, but more importantly, the learners have loved.
Fun with Quadratic Equations : Beauty in Curves
I was approached by an Nanyang Girls High School Math teacher to partner with her for a Quadratic equation lesson. Two classes would be combined, so along with a little extra help she was excited to use this as an opportunity to try something new. As I went on an expedition to find an interesting space for the lesson, I happened to look down and was instantly inspired to see that the tiled floors in our outdoor corridors were life size graph paper! I found some long PVC pipes in the Makerspace and voilà, we had perfect X, Y axes.
As seen from above, we observe and learn about the beauty and flow of an organic shape. Playing with scale, when we see each student representing what would normally be a dot on a page, it gives us the illusion of looking through a microscope.
Getty Ready, Get Set . . .
Gamifying learning just makes learning more engaging for everyone. Prior to the lesson, I asked the Math teacher to place several Quadratic Equation problems in a bag. When Gamifying, I always add an element of randomness, especially when there is a selection process. At the start of the lesson, a student from each class pulled out an equation from the bag, followed by my announcement, “You have 10 minutes for all the groups in each class to find the solution to the problem. Let the games begin! Make this the best 10 minutes of your life!” A little drama always adds some exciting energy. Below, check out how the lesson unfolded.
Let the Games begin
Classes divided into sub-groups and documented their process on poster board. All students had to find the correct answer before their class could advance to the next level of the game.
What's the Point?
Once all the groups in a class had solved the problem, they moved to the “graph paper” on the floor and plotted themselves on the curve as the solution to the equation.
Tell Me A Little About Yourself
Color paper was given distributed to identify the critical points. Each class interviewed the critical points using an iPad to document their explanation of the solution.
We Belong Together
The first class to plot themselves correctly,
were the winners!