Tower Design, Build and Test as a STEAM Project

Author(s):  
Judith Bazler

The next generation science standards promote the teaching of engineering skills including the designing, testing, and building of models. Tower building can yield real world experience that not only provides the student with physics and mathematics through motion and stability but also through the explanation of the use of models and the engineering practice of design, redesign, and testing of these models. Tia Pliskow used the project of building a tower with her middle school students in order to provide a cooperative team long-term project. She focused first on the design, using background information on existing towers. She required each team to design their tower first using graph paper and scale. This process stressed the need for science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. The case included in this article expands her process by including a cost analysis attempting to promote real world engineering, links to more content, and final project photos. In addition, by building a shake platform, a test for the tower is added.

Author(s):  
Judith A. Bazler

The next generation science standards promote the teaching of engineering skills including the designing, testing and building of models. Tower building can provide a real world experience that not only provides the students with physics and mathematics through motion and stability but the explanation of the use of models and the engineering practice of design, redesign and testing of these models. Tia Pilskow (2014) used the project of building a tower with her middle school students in order to provide a cooperative team long term project. She focused first on the design using background information on existing towers. She required each team to design their tower first using graph paper and scale. This process stressed the need for Art and Mathematics in the STEAM project. The science, technology and engineering also played a major part in the design. The case included in this article expands her process by including a cost analysis attempting to promote real world engineering.


2014 ◽  
Vol 902 ◽  
pp. 437-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adeel Khalid ◽  
Brent Terwilliger ◽  
Anthony Coppola ◽  
Jim Marion ◽  
David Ison ◽  
...  

In this paper, the Real World Design Challenge (RWDC) competition is discussed in detail. This paper highlights the need, history, and approach taken for the design of the challenge. The authors discuss how this challenge promotes Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and provides opportunities for high school students to acquire knowledge and experience beyond their traditional curriculum. The challenge is based around a real world problem. Students are asked to work in teams to find feasible solutions for the identified problem. The process for developing the challenge, student engagement, learning opportunities, student evaluations, publicity and recruitment efforts, design objective and timeline, and assessment metrics are some of the topics discussed. In this paper, the lessons learned from developing and running the challenge are also addressed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016235322110447
Author(s):  
Hope E. Wilson

Residential Science High Schools (RSHS) for academically talented students that focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) provide opportunities for high school students to accelerate their education. This study examines the results of a retrospective survey from one RSHS, including alumni for more than 20 years after graduation. The results indicate that the alumni have high levels of educational attainment and careers in STEM fields. In addition, the alumni perceive their experiences at the RSHS to have been positive, and that the RSHS prepared them for their educational pursuits, careers, social experiences, and future leadership positions. Finally, although the alumni did report a drop in academic self-concept while they were in the program, this drop did not appear to have an effect on their long-term goals or educational attainment. The implications for this study are to support the use of radical acceleration in the form of residential schools for an educational intervention for academically talented high school students.


Author(s):  
Shih-Yun Lu ◽  
Chih-Cheng Lo ◽  
Jia-Yu Syu

AbstractThe main purpose of the living technology curriculum is to cultivate students' interest in learning science and technology, and further to utilize their experience of learning instructions and develop their ability to integrate interdisciplinary knowledge and skills. In recent years, as countries have begun to emphasize the concept of interdisciplinary integration in the school education, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, STEM) focuses on cultivating interdisciplinary talents. With this, STEAM highlights the role of ART because other dimensions of STEM are expected to be effectively integrated through the cultivation of aesthetics; the purpose of this study is to design a STEAM curriculum for elementary school children and to explore the impact of STEAM education on the creativity. The content of this course is based on the PBL (Project-Based Learning) with the teaching activities combining with “Chinese Paper-cutting” and “BBC micro: bit”. The teaching process is used the strategy of creative thinking instruction. The research method adopts a one-group pretest–posttest design based on a purposive sampling of 21 students from one class in an elementary school. The research tools included the records of learning feedback and the creativity assessment. The empirical findings show that the project-based learning incorporating STEAM activity has a positive significant influence on students’ development of creative recognition. Since the empirical results are constricted by the short-term STEAM course, the STEAM course with the art-oriented still benefits the STEAM education and Learning effectiveness of elementary school students. The implication of interdisciplinary interactive Lamp of Paper Carving with Micro:Bit is expected to contribute to further development of STEAM course. Since the curriculum is only last for few weeks, it is too short to affect the emotional facet of creativity. Future researches are suggested to extend the teaching period and evaluate the long-term influence of PBL STEAM on students' learning attitude.


Author(s):  
Worapan Kusakunniran ◽  
Rawitas Krungkaew

The foreground segmentation in a video is a way to extract changes in image sequences. It is a key task in an early stage of many applications in the computer vision area. The information of changes in the scene must be segmented before any further analysis could be taken place. However, it remains with difficulties caused by several real-world challenges such as cluttered backgrounds, changes of the illumination, shadows, and long-term scene changes. This paper proposes a novel method, namely a dynamic codebook (DCB), to address such challenges of the dynamic backgrounds. It relies on a dynamic modeling of the background scene. Initially, a codebook is constructed to represent the background information of each pixel over a period of time. Then, a dynamic boundary of the codebook will be made to support variations of the background. The revised codebook will always be adaptive to the new background's environments. This makes the foreground segmentation more robust to the changes of background scene. The proposed method has been evaluated by using the changedetection.net (CDnet) benchmark which is a well-known video dataset for testing change-detection algorithms. The experimental results and comprehensive comparisons have shown a very promising performance of the proposed method.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (21) ◽  
pp. 7354
Author(s):  
Cara Broß ◽  
Carolin Enzingmüller ◽  
Ilka Parchmann ◽  
Gerhard Schmidt

A major challenge in modern society is the need to increase awareness and excitement with regard to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and related careers directly or among peers and parents in order to attract future generations of scientists and engineers. The numbers of students aiming for an engineering degree are low compared to the options available and the workforce needed. This may, in part, be due to a traditional lack of instruction in this area in secondary school curricula. In this regard, STEM outreach programs can complement formal learning settings and help to promote engineering as well as science to school students. In a long-term outreach collaboration with scientists and engineers, we developed an outreach program in the field of magnetoelectric sensing that includes an out-of-school project day and various accompanying teaching materials. In this article, we motivate the relevance of the topic for educational outreach, share the rationales, objectives and aims, models and implementation strategies of our program and provide practical advice for those interested in outreach in the field of magnetoelectric sensing.


Author(s):  
Roberto Araya ◽  
Masami Isoda ◽  
Johan van der Molen van der Molen Moris

COVID-19 has been extremely difficult to control. The lack of understanding of key aspects of pandemics has affected virus transmission. On the other hand, there is a demand to incorporate computational thinking (CT) in the curricula with applications in STEM. However, there are still no exemplars in the curriculum that apply CT to real-world problems such as controlling a pandemic or other similar global crises. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing exemplars of CT for modeling the pandemic. We designed exemplars following the three pillars of the framework for CT from the Inclusive Mathematics for Sustainability in a Digital Economy (InMside) project by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC): algorithmic thinking, computational modeling, and machine learning. For each pillar, we designed a progressive sequence of activities that covers from elementary to high school. In an experimental study with elementary and middle school students from 2 schools of high vulnerability, we found that the computational modeling exemplar can be implemented by teachers and correctly understood by students. We conclude that it is feasible to introduce the exemplars at all grade levels and that this is a powerful example of Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) integration that helps reflect and tackle real-world and challenging public health problems of great impact for students and their families.


2020 ◽  
pp. 24-33
Author(s):  
K. V. Rozov

The article presents the structure, content and results of approbation of the C++ programming course developed for the 10th grade students of physics and mathematics profile and implemented as part of the academic subject “Informatics”. The aim of the course is to develop in the student not only knowledge and skills in programming, but also his algorithmic culture and programming culture as important qualities of a potential IT-specialist. This is facilitated by special control of educational process by the teacher, which consists in monitoring the activities of students in writing programs and timely correction of this activity. The assessment of the level of development of student algorithmic culture and programming culture relative to the basic level of their formation (when mastering the basics of algorithmization and programming in the 9th grade) was carried out on the basis of a number of criteria presented in the article. The results of approbation showed that the specially organized teacher activity makes it possible to increase the level of algorithmic culture and programming culture of high school students when studying the basics of programming in C++.


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