Andrews – Andrews Elementary School celebrated all things “Full STEAM Ahead” with help from the Creative Discovery Museum of Chattanooga (Tenn.) on March 18.
The STEAM acronym stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math. Formerly known as STEM, as a principle of education emphasizing science and math-based curricula, the “A” for Art was added in recent years to also generate interest in the arts in education.
Principal Kim Davis said the idea for the night started “with a conversation with my colleague Brandi Roper in Ranger. She told me about the CDM’s program, and I thought that would be great to have them show up for our kids.”
The late afternoon drew more than 150 students and parents, as attendees experimented at a total of nine different stations that encouraged building foam cottages using hammers and golf tees to complete the tiny abodes along with building a newspaper “bridge,” which students then weighted with cars to understand capacity. Aluminum foil was used to create “boats,” which were then floated in water to help teach about buoyancy and displacement.
Other learning stations included the airplane wind tunnel, which allowed students to construct an airplane using materials from coffee filters to paper, then set the plane aloft on a small wind tunnel fan to see how the far the craft would fly.
Sally Tyrell and Brittany Young with the Creative Discovery Museum served as the outreach educators for the night welcoming students and parents and providing information about other programs offered through CDM.
“We typically travel about a three-hour radius for these events,” Tyrell said. “We’re able to visit a great variety of schools within that zone, and many have even been to the museum before for school trips.”
Young added, “Our educators are a team of certified teachers and we also have different theme nights teachers can choose from. We also help outreach to homeschool groups and we provide programs for pre-K to middle school-age children.”
The students shouted with glee as their planes soared through the gymnasium and also there were stations set up for building ramps and a specially lit up table featuring the Ozobots.
The Ozobots work on the principle of your creating a “map” or path that the tiny robot will then learn and follow according to its different color codes of black, blue, red and green. While these little creatures zoomed across the table the students and parents both marveled at their ability to “learn” and follow the routes.
Another activity that engaged with pathways and building modes of travel was the ramps section, which allowed use of repurposed material such as pipes and tubes along with strips of rubber to create “highways.”
The most popular station of the event was a Rube Goldberg machine-building station. A “Rube Goldberg” is a device built from complicated gadgets, which seemingly include a series of unrelated elements that form a chain reaction of sorts to give a simple and desired result. Several kids and adults recognized it as akin to a game from the 1980s called Mousetrap.
Overall, the evening was declared a great success, and the kids enjoyed getting to do some experimental building and crafting, according to both Davis and assistant principal Diane Kinne.
Details: Visit aes.cherokee.k12.nc.us.