Throughout the month of January, students enrolled in the district’s after-school daycare program, Cat Care, participated in activities, demonstrations, and investigations to celebrate STEM month. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
The focus of the first week included wind turbines; specifically, how they produce clean energy, why Oklahoma is a prime location for wind farms, and investigating blade design. Throughout the second week the focus was on types of bridges, bridge design, and the pros and cons of each design. Students were given the opportunity to explore different types of bridge design and to construct a model bridge of their own creation. During the last week of the month, the focus was on creating and testing model cars powered by sails.
Before experiments began, staff spent time daily drilling students over vocabulary specific to the scientific process to help build student background knowledge. Some examples included STEM, hypothesis, results, observations, etc.
The purpose for STEM month was to build knowledge in regard to the scientific method which includes:
- Identifying Purpose/Question/Problem: What do you want to learn?
- Research: Learning about the topic
- Forming a Hypothesis: An educated guess or prediction of the results.
- Experiment: Test your hypothesis
- Observation: What did you observe?
- Analysis/Result: Record of what happened during the experiment and communicate conclusion.
- Describing the importance of variables and ensuring a consistent testing environment exists when testing a hypothesis was also part of the learning experience. Students responded to the activities with positivity and enthusiasm. Fun was had by all!
Students pictured L-R: Easton Fisher, Aden Montenegro, and Seth Greenhagen