Science: Unlocking Potential
Dr Caroline Oprandi Keeping you up to date with science and technology at PACA
We won the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) club of the year award recently and an award for the Starburst Elements Electronic project at the Big Bang Fair. The Big Bang Fair is an event held every year at the South of England Showground and it is superbly organised by STEM Sussex. Something that really shone through during the judging was the children’s passion for their projects. The children have been working really hard during their lunchtime and afterschool clubs in order to get them finished.
When people come through our TARDIS doorway into the STEM centre most people have the same initial reaction – wow! Parents say that it makes them want to come back to school. We have turtles, a Galaxy Pod Ant Farm and an incubator with quail eggs in that will hatch out any day now. We then have our array of telescopes, our 3D printer, our Raspberry Pi’s and Arduino’s plus electric powered vehicles and swamp boats. Also not forgetting our Natural Cosmetic Beauty range with glass fusing plus the Starburst Elements Periodic Table project.
Recently visiting our STEM centre were students and teachers from Darwen Aldridge Academy. The Vice Principle asked me, “but how do you measure the effectiveness of it and what about exams and a syllabus?” My reply was, “well we don’t; that is the point! We are tapping into children’s (and adult’s so it seems) natural curiosity for the world around them”. The only thing I’m keen to measure is engagement and has it re-lit a human desire to discover and find out more?
I just don’t understand where the drive has come from to measure and analyse every aspect of a child’s schooling. It certainly wasn’t the case in my day. In the education sector’s eyes, if it can’t be measured and justified then it clearly can’t be a good thing. We are talking about developing human beings here, not robots or a product from the end of a factory line.
Data collection has gone crazy in Britain. I don’t think there is any other nation that tests and analyses data on school children quite like we do. So who exactly is driving this mass data collection agenda and what are we actually doing it for? Our well qualified schoolchildren are less creative and less equipped for entering the workplace than ever before. I’ll just take a wild stab in the dark but maybe there is a correlation between how we are now teaching our schoolchildren to effectively pass tests rather than developing a rich understanding of the world they live in.
If evidence is needed then here you go… at a recent STEM lesson we had a very shy year 10 girl who is in the bottom set for science absolutely smash the top set at a STEM challenge. The challenge was to see how many beads could be raised within a polystyrene cup by building a wind turbine. Most were managing around 3-6 beads, her wind turbine mechanism lifted 38!
