STEAM education

2BCF: Week 6

Monday was the last day of camp. We helped to conduct exit surveys with all of the students and pack up all the supplies to bring back to the warehouse. It was a bittersweet day.

I was helping this one student to fill out the survey, when the question, “What didn’t you like about camp?” popped up. Now, this particular student had caused problems all of camp and had complained every day. I was bracing myself for her response, when she said, “I loved everything. I loved the legos, 3D print pens, stop motion animation…my mom is buying me a 3D print pen for my birthday, because I know how to 3D print now!”

I was pretty blown away by her response. Even though she can complained every day, she had actually enjoyed herself. And this camp had actually made an impact on her that will continue on as she develops more design skills from practicing 3D printing. She even asked if she would see me again next year, and was bummed when I said I wouldn’t be returning.

Even though I hadn’t planned on helping out at a summer camp during my internship, it helped to remind me of why I do what I do. I love working with kids, playing, and spreading the joy of STEM.

Please enjoy these photos of me being dunked on the last day of camp in our own makeshift dunk tank.

After camp, we got back to work. I started to work with my co-intern Aubrey to program our Space Squad game. It had been a while since I used Unity and a little bit of an upward battle. I got buttons to attach and was able to get those working.

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We also decided this week to work together as a team to refine the puzzle box escape room for beta night. During camp, we ran a 3D printing program where students learned how to use 3D print pens. As an extra activity to reinforce learning, Jacob and Justin built a puzzle box escape room. Students had 15-20 minutes to build tools using the 3D print pens to unlock/solve the puzzle boxes. Testing with the students allowed them to get more data about how to make the puzzles more robust.

Given the success of this experience, we decided to work together as a team to refine this experience and test at Beta Night. Beta Night is an event held once a month at the Two Bit Circus Microamusement Park. Companies are invited to beta test their new experiences to the public for free. This was an opportunity for us to showcase our work to the corporate side of Two Bit Circus.

We split up tasks and worked on beginning to revise the puzzles and create all the additional materials necessary to bring the experience together.


2BCF: Week 3

Camp started in Hawthorne, and we were responsible for helping out with the first week of programming. Specifically, I helped teach a stop motion animation class and 3D print pens class.

Having mentored and run an afterschool school science fair program for low-income/high-need students in college, I was familiar with working with at-risk youth. A constant thread throughout my career has been working to promote STEAM education in this demographic. It’s something that I constantly think about in the projects that I decide to take on.

However, in my previous role at NOVA, I didn’t get many opportunities to directly engage with my audience. Working at summer camp was a great reminder of how many design parameters are involved when creating experiences for this demographic.

At camp, we had a ratio of 1:10, one facilitator to ten students, and even that felt chaotic. In a normal classroom, one teacher is typically managing 25-30+ students. So when designing experiences for the classroom, you have to consider the facilitator’s involvement. The best case scenario is that the experience does not require a facilitator, so that the teacher can spend their time providing one-on-one help to students and putting out the inevitable constant fires (aka projectile vomiting, bleeding, and fist fights).

Getting students’ attention is tough. Especially, when they don’t know you, they won’t listen. My co-facilitator Max bribed students to pay attention and behave by using his body. And by that I mean demoing yo-yo tricks and handstands. It actually worked like a charm. By the end of camp, Max was running his own gymnastics camp during recess.

An activity must be fun and challenging enough for students to be engaged. Older students need wider parameters for activities so that they can self-express, while younger students need a lot more hand-holding. Students are hypersensitive to what is age-appropriate to them.

But if the activity is too hard, students will tune out. For the 3D print pens curriculum, students were challenged to build the tallest tower possible using the 3D print pens. The younger students really struggled with this and were discouraged easily. For the younger students it made more sense to provide them with templates and to let them have free play. While the older students could be incentivized to do more difficult engineering challenges with prizes.

I also had forgotten how hypersensitive students are to social constructs. Especially the middle schoolers; it’s not “cool” to be smart and it’s not “cool” to work hard. No matter what YOU say or do, it’s not cool (even if they really think its cool, they’ll never tell you). Middle schoolers are a tough audience, and having to work around that is difficult as well.