In January, Stroman STEM Academy introduced weekly design challenges for its sixth grade students, called Friday STEM Day.
Each Friday, students engage in “Design Time” alternating between their science and social studies classes. During this time, they receive an engineering design challenge to solve. Students work together using the following process:
Identify the problem
Imagine how to solve the problem
Plan design with materials provided within set time constraints
Create design
Learn from setbacks and mistakes along the way to make improvements
During the spring semester so far, students have participated in five engineering design challenges where they have designed transportation systems, potato batteries, museum exhibits of models of the Earth's layers, created culturally aligned musical instruments out of raw materials and cleaned up an "oil spill" using limited resources.
“Friday has become one of our students' favorite days each week because it is fun and hands-on and one of our teacher's favorite days because they get to see incredibly creative designs and outside of the box thinking from their students,” said Jordan Ivy, STEM instructional coach. “Our students definitely look forward to and enjoy the STEM challenges each week, especially the messy ones!”