When testing to see if a little bridge made out of LEGOs can withstand the weight of a mini bottle of Gatorade, 10 seconds can feel like 10 minutes.
The expressions on these students’ faces are priceless as they place their carefully engineered masterpieces on a table for inspection. Watching as various items are placed on the bridges for the ultimate test, they go from an intense wide-eyed state of focus to letting out that massive sigh of relief when the timer hits zero.
(Occasionally there is a chorus of “Ohhhh!”s if the bridge breaks under pressure).
Suspenseful, maybe, but they are definitely learning and – bonus – having fun at the same time.
The Future Innovators Camp is a brand new summer camp this year. Students in rising fourth through sixth grades are participating in hands-on STEAM learning led by BCSD’s Instructional Technology team.
The four-day long camp was held last week at MenRiv and then started up again this week to work with a new group of students at Philip Simmons Middle.
Priscilla Calcutt, Director of Instructional Technology, said they wanted to target areas of the district that did not have a BCSD-led camp. Instructional Technology team members aim to apply for a grant this year so they can bring it back next summer – bigger and better with more student participation, particularly in the district’s more rural areas.
The whole purpose behind the camp is to get them excited about careers in STEAM.
“I really hope that they begin thinking about their future,” Calcutt said. “Future Innovators is designed around the engineering/design process – going through and researching and creating something, and then refining it to make it even better.”
Students are programming drones to fly through a makeshift obstacle course, coding with MicroBits, dabbling in snap circuits and enjoying rocket launches. In between those bigger items, they are exercising their critical thinking and problem solving skills.
Students have also participated in an “entrepreneur” class within the camp where they got to come up with their own business to run. On Tuesday, the district iTOW truck came out and students got to use the truck’s laser cutter machine to create their business logos.
The students’ mornings kickoff with a fun hands-on activity to get the gears going; in the case of Tuesday morning, they built the bridges out of LEGOs with some parameters in place. The bridges needed two supporting pillars that were the width of a pencil; the bridge deck (the park one would walk on) needed to be suspended at least 3.5 inches above the ground; finally, the bridge then needed to hold a weight for at least 10 seconds without collapsing.
“They love a challenge,” Calcutt said. “They can all approach the same thing in different ways – and that’s one thing that they’ve learned too: everybody does not have to do the exact same thing to get to the same result.”
