Empowering the Little People
I was lucky enough to present at and attend the Regional Conference that was held in Kansas City the first weekend in November. This was my first time attending an NCTM event. I loved every minute of it and learned a lot. I have been telling my co-workers they should really try to get themselves to one of the regional conferences next year.
My session fit under the Innovations In Integrated Learning strand. As stated in the catalog, “Empowering students through exploration and authentic mathematics experiences can be transformative for teaching and learning. Presentations in this strand highlight effective implementation of experiential, integrated learning, which may include design thinking, project-based learning, problem-based learning, and engineering design.”
I try to provide as many integrated learning opportunities for the students in my elementary Innovations classes. One of the activities that have been very successful with my 1st and 2nd-grade classes is our Apple Stand Engineer Design Process Project.
During this project, we learn about the basic steps to the engineer design process.
Once the students have a good understanding of each of the steps we are ready to move on to our own engineering problem. I tell the students a story about how I have an apple tree in my yard and how this year our tree has grown far too many apples for just my family to eat that we have decided to try and sell some of the apples. Only trouble is, we don’t have a stand to put the apples on. The students’ task is to build a stand for my apples using the material provided. The apples are small pom-poms. The stand materials they are provided are 2 toilet paper tubes, 5 big popsicle sticks, and 5 small popsicle sticks. I tell them I didn’t have enough money for any other supplies, so they are not able to use any tape or glue, and they cannot cut or put holes into the tubes. From there, I give them time to ask me questions, and then it is time for them to imagine their ideas.
Students use the Seesaw app to draw their plans. Once their plans are created they then build their stands.
Once the stands are build students take pictures of them in the Seesaw app. We talk about how real engineers use plans and take many pictures to help them with their projects. Once the stands are built it is now time to test the stands out to find out just how many apples they can hold.
When testing the stands, we talk about how we don’t want to just put a whole bunch of apples on the stand all at the same time because if it doesn’t hold all of them, we won’t know why the stand didn’t work. So, students add just five apples at a time, recording the results again with a photograph in Seesaw. Students continue to add 5 apples at a time until the stand cannot hold anymore.
From there, we discussed what worked and did not work with each of our stands. Then I allow the students to combine both materials and ideas and with a partner, this time they try to improve their apple stands so they can hold more apples than before. It is always so fun to see the variety in the groups as they create, build and test their stands.
You can find my entire presentation here bit.ly/KoryNCTM18
