St Vincent's Aranda and Mother Teresa School combine to create Tinker Maker Day
What do Harry Potter, Prosthetic Limbs, Banana Controllers, the search for your personal Genius and Rogaining Robots have in common? Not a lot, but they sure are inspiring. These stimulating lines of inquiries recently made up a day of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) learning for 140 Year 6 students from St Vincent’s Aranda and Mother Teresa School students. Throw in a challenging and inspiring presentation on Girls in STEM and we had an amazing day of tinkering and collaboration.
With a focus on provocations that would allow for a variety of solutions and multiple access points, each inquiry gave students a chance to share their personal skills and work collaboratively with each other to design, prototype, test and reflect.
Throughout the day students were invited to prototype and build prosthetic limbs using cardboard and MakeDo equipment. Some chose to work on one finger at a time, others the hand, still others built exoskeletons and one group decided that a full iron man suit was achievable.
Another rotation made use of Little Bits and the student interest in Harry Potter to create an artefact that would be used in the Wizarding world. Bananas, apples and other materials were used to create game controllers in conjunction with Makey Makey kits and the coding program Scratch.
During a robotics inquiry students had a chance to plan a route for the M-Bots and designed a game using the new Scratch version 3.0. We were very fortunate to have a parent from the Mother Teresa community who ran a workshop for students that guided them towards finding their own personal ‘genius’. Students really valued this time to reflect on what they love to do and what they are good at.
Both schools are now looking forward to seeing how the students will incorporate some of these ways of thinking into the learning they are doing in their schools. Using Google Classroom during the day and after the event was a way to facilitate sharing, reflection and further learning.
The Tinker Maker day could not have taken place without the support of colleagues from both Mother Teresa School and St Vincent’s Aranda and of course parents, Assistant Professor Dr Kim Simoncini of the University of Canberra and small business owner April Mack who volunteered their amazing skills and knowledge to support the students.
The valued advice of Lora Bance (Innovation Officer, Catholic Education) and Toni Falusi (CSER Project Officer for the ACT) was also utilised to further develop the STEM practices involved in the day.
