Sue Mellon

By Barbara Ray

At the beginning, people thought she was nuts. Sue Mellon, gifted support coordinator for Springdale Junior and Senior High/Colfax School in the Allegheny Valley School District, thought 7^th and 8^thgraders could develop a deeper understanding of poetry by playing around with robotics.

“Originally, people looked at me like I was crazy,” Mellon said. Now, two years later, Robotics Poetry is a staple of language arts classes at Springdale and a new grant has students preparing to be peer mentors.

Poetry isn’t always easy for students. But with hands-on engagement, they gain new understanding. Take Robert Frost’s “Pasture.” Instead of just reading and discussing the work in a typical classroom setting, students made 21st-century dioramas with robotic tool kits containing sensors, motors, LEDs, and a controller. One student made a blue plastic wrap lake in an old cardboard photocopy-paper box that vibrated, thanks to the motor, and, lit up, thanks to the LED. When the student said the word “water”—students record themselves reading the poems aloud in the audio-editing program Audacity—the LED turned the plastic wrap a deeper shade of blue. When he got to the bit about the “tottering” calf, the motor made the toy calf vibrate.

“A lot of kids aren’t crazy about poetry,” Mellon said. “But we have to help them engage with it. After spending two weeks analyzing the poem and creating visual imagery and symbolism for their dioramas, they really understand the work and get quite passionate.”

Stories like Mellon’s can be found all around the Allegheny School District these days as the area, already renowned for its groundbreaking work in STEM, takes on STEAM.

[RELATED READING: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype]

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math; it’s become a shorthand way for talking about how to prepare American students for a 21st-century, globalized economy. But, as STEM took hold, some begun to wonder if there was a component missing. Enter the STEAM movement, championed by people like John Maeda, president of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, and former engineer Georgette Yakman. The idea is fairly simple: STEM needs to include art and design.

“STEAM is not a new curriculum,” Yakman said. “It’s a framework for teaching.” On February 14, the idea got the Beltway stamp of approval when the Congressional STEAM Caucus launched.

CRITICAL FOR INNOVATION

The move to include art and design in the push to advance science, engineering, and math is not just a “feel-good” move. It’s critical to the future economy and families’ standard of living. Researchers are finding that although children’s IQ scores have been steadily rising, results on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking—a key measure of creativity—have been on the decline since 1990, just as the demand for more creative thinkers is rising. In a 2010 IBM survey, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as a top leadership competency of the future.

That’s why the “A” for arts is so important, and why Pittsburgh’s school districts and afterschool networks are taking arts and design so seriously.

Arts & Bots/ Carnegie Mellon University

For some members of the Allegheny Valley School District, that extra A isn’t as radical as it may seem.

“We’ve always been STEAM based,” said Ed McKaveney, technology director for the Hampton Township School District. “It just didn’t have a name before.”

For others, it has slightly different meanings.

“The A is the creative element,” said Jennifer Vecchio, assistant elementary principal at Colfax Upper Elementary. “It’s looking at birds flying and understanding what that has to do with velocity.”

Bart Rocco, superintendent of the Elizabeth Forward School District, said the transition from STEM to STEAM isn’t really about adding anything at all.

“Personally, I’m not a big acronym guy,” Rocco said. “Science, technology, engineering, math, art—that’s all really important. But really, integration is what’s the issue. That’s the critical piece.”

Both Vecchio and Rocco are right, according to Linda Hippert, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit (AIU), a state agency that supports school districts in Allegheny County. Together with Intermediate Unit 1 in neighboring counties, the AIU oversees the Center for Creativity, an initiative that offers STEAM grants to enable teachers and administrators to implement classroom-based programs integrating left-brain and right-brain learning.

[RELATED READING: Nurturing the Next Van Gogh? Start With Small Steps]

For Hippert, the story really started one October afternoon six years ago at a professional development event for local superintendents. They’d all read Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind,” and then Pink came in to discuss the importance of creativity. He spoke to them about the importance of “right-brain qualities” like empathy and inventiveness.

“The message was loud and clear,” Hippert said. “And that’s when the movement started. Being strong in math and science wasn’t enough. To meet future workforce needs, we had to address the whole-brain needs of our students.”

That kind of thinking is absolutely right.

REAL WORLD PROJECTS

As Enrico Moretti in his book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” notes, for the first time in history, “the factor that is scarce is not physical capital, but creativity.” The decline is driving the divergence in economies and in families’ wallets. The majority of a product’s value today, he writes, comes from its original idea, not the manufacturing of it. The latter can be done cheaply almost anywhere else, but the “good” jobs lie in innovation, design, and engineering.

As Pittsburgh well knows, the sector responsible for raising the wages of American workers was once manufacturing. Today, as Moretti writes, “the innovation sector determines the salary of many Americans, whether they work in innovation or not.”

[RELATED READING: Hands-On Science Exams Reveal Students' Skills]

This thinking is evident throughout the Allegheny School District.

“The question is how do we keep our students competitive,” said Bille Rondinelli, superintendent of the South Fayette School District. “The answer is whole-brain thinking.”

One of the keys to success in implementing these ideas lies in collaborations and partnerships.

In South Fayette, students work with kitchenware maker All-Clad. Five years ago, when the partnership started, it focused on manufacturing and ran under a STEM grant. Now, students are helping design the pots and pans of the future and considering issues of environmental packaging. This new, more creative work is being done under a STEAM grant.

The Allegheny Valley School District is using its STEAM grant to start a Living Class Room for upper elementary students. At the beginning of this school year, students started building an outdoor space where they designed and planted a garden. They’re also working on environmental issues like rain collection, solar cells, and composting. They design and make their own tables to use in the garden and use of iPads to identify birdcalls and keep their digital journals.

“STEAM offers a total experience for children,” said Cheryl Griffith, superintendent of Allegheny Valley School District, which is also home to Sue Mellon’s Robotics Poetry.

In the West Allegheny School District, high school students can take an electronic and acoustic sound class where they learn the science of sound, but, instead of sitting at their desk reading from a textbook, they’re studying and modifying different instruments.

Next year, the West Allegheny School District hopes to start a middle school game center. Chris Assetta, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, has a date on her calendar to go visit the Elizabeth Forward School District, which launched one in January 2012.

Heather Hibner is an English teacher who now teaches in the Elizabeth Forward Entertainment Technology Academy (ETA). If you walked by the four long windows of her classroom you’d see “people getting things done,” Hibner said. “If you walk by what I now call a boring classroom, it looks more orderly but really everyone is just zoned out.”

[RELATED READING: Why Learning Should be Messy]

It’s a lot messier in her classroom, Hibner said, but that’s because the students are engaged. They’re working in teams and at their own pace. They’re doing independent projects, modding games, and coming up with stories.

Curriculum for the ETA starts with a history of games going back to ancient Babylon. Then students go on to learn things like 3D design, scripting, storytelling, and computer programming.

“Today, you need teachers who can integrate both sides of the brain,” Rocco said.

According to Hibner, doing whole-brain teaching isn’t difficult but actually feels more natural. The real key, she said, is getting out of the way. “I’m a facilitator really,” she said. “I talk for five minutes and I work one-on-one, but I’m not the ‘sage on the stage’ anymore; really the students are their own guides.”

This post originally appeared on Remake Learning.

Quest to Learn

By Ashley Williams, Youth Radio

What if your extracurricular activities weren’t just extra but a part of your academics too? New thinking on education intends to bring students’ interests into the classroom. It’s called Connected Learning and promotes the idea that students will excel in school if what they are learning is relevant to their lives, experiences, and passions. This plan is spelled out in a new report, by Mimi Ito, the research director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California Irvine.

While students would still learn core subjects like math and science, Connected Learning provides ways for students to link their classroom lessons to their lives outside the school. Ito says the objective of Connected Learning is to, “meet young people where they are in terms of their peer culture, their interest in popular culture, social media, rather than say you have to meet us where we are as adults.”

Ito uses the Harry Potter Alliance to demonstrate how Connected Learning’s can be effective. She says, “the HPA connects young people who are inspired by the civic virtues portrayed in the Harry Potter books, and want to apply them to the real world.” This fan network organizes over social media platforms (Facebook, Livestream, Youtube, Twitter) to spread awareness and solutions to issues like, equality, and human rights, and to support of charitable causes. Literacy has been a central focus of the group. Their annual book drive has brought 85,000 donations since 2009 and contributions have helped build a library for a charter school in NYC.

Ito says another prime example of Connected Learning is at Youth Radio. The youth-driven media organization channels young peoples’ passions into education and job training. For instance, the poetry group inside Youth Radio, Remix Your Life, helps strengthen students’ writing skills, public speaking  and presentation skills while providing an outlet for us to express what we’re passionate about.

Here’s where Connected Learning could help close the opportunity gap. Ito says, “it’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.” She adds that “having their interests, their identities validated in the context of academic achievement, civic engagement” is essential to keeping students engaged. This could lead to better student performance.  But even more than improved grades, the goal for Connected Learning Ito states, is “not about individual achievement, it’s about contributing in the real world.”

EXCERPT FROM CONNECTED LEARNING: AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH AND DESIGN

CASE STUDY:

A toy replica of a 1950s pickup truck with a 100-gram cast iron weight in its bed races down a wooden plank and crashes into an upright textbook that rests precariously on the edge of a high stool. The book wobbles and then topples several feet before smacking the floor with a loud slap. As it falls, the book collides with the raised end of a yardstick whose middle rests over a makeshift fulcrum, creating a seesaw-like lever. The impact catapults a small bottle of hand-sanitizer a few inches into the air before falling and bouncing on the floor. “Hmm,” says the 11-year-old student who released the car. The student and her classmates have been challenged to build a Rube Goldberg machine—a complex machine that performs a simple task—that can dispense hand sanitizer from a bottle with a pump-top. One of the student’s teammates suggests, “Let’s try a larger stool.”

This is Boss Level, a special two-week period that takes place at the end of each trimester at Quest to Learn, a 6th- through 12th-grade public school that opened in Manhattan in the fall of 2009. Quest is the first school in the country to organize its entire curriculum to be “game-like.” It is also attempting to incorporate many of the connected learning principles into an urban public school. Boss Levels are the times during the school year when these principles are most fully realized. During Boss Level, regular classes are suspended, classrooms are rearranged into work spaces, teachers fall into the background, and students work in small teams on a single “challenge” that culminates in a showcase and party for the school’s educators, staff, and family members. In addition to Rube Goldberg machines, Quest educators have challenged
students to write and perform short plays based on fairy tales, to design and orchestrate a series of outdoor games for an end-of-the-year field day, to research and construct a travel website featuring three NYC neighborhoods, to build a sculpture from recycled materials, and so forth. In each case, Boss Levels attempt to weave together connected learning principles with the strictures of school-based practices.

PEER SUPPORTED

Students drive activity during Boss Levels more than at any other time during the year. While educators put students onto teams and define the challenges, students take the lead in designing, discovering, and evaluating possible solutions. Students provide each other with ongoing feedback about each other’s ideas and work styles. They engage in delicate, and often difficult, negotiations over what their team should try next, who should do what, and who can tell or ask someone else to do something. While failure is commonplace, and while conflicts sometimes arise, educators resist intervening extensively. In general, students are active and highly engaged, and the classroom is often vibrant and boisterous.

INTEREST POWERED

While Quest educators define Boss Level challenges, students have extensive opportunities for connecting Boss Level projects to their own interests, many of which are dissociated from conventional schooling practices. For example, when a Boss Level challenge asked students to write, stage, and perform short plays based on fairy tales, students wove numerous interests and cultural forms from their out-of-school lives into the productions. One scene took place in a medieval coffee shop called “Moonbucks”; plots and characters drew inspiration from popular books, video games, music, and movies; several students with an interest in fashion worked on costumes; a student who was enrolled in an after school program for gymnastics helped choreograph stage fights; students who participated in online fan fiction communities worked on scripts; students who were interested in media production helped with recording and mixing sound effects; all students produced daily podcasts that provided updates about their projects to family members. In doing so, Boss Level blurred conventional divisions between education and peer cultures.

ACADEMICALLY ORIENTED

Boss Levels confer academic legitimacy on creative activities that are typically absent or marginalized at conventional schools. By treating Boss Level as the culminating academic experience for every trimester, and by showcasing the students’ work to family members and members of the New York City design community, Quest bestows academic legitimacy on forms of work that are not easily measured by standardized assessments.

At the same time, Quest attempts to link Boss Level challenges to more widely recognized academic domains and competencies. For example, the Rube Goldberg machine challenge required students to put into practice knowledge about physics and simple machines that they had been learning about over the course of the trimester. Similarly, Boss Levels encourage students to approach design challenges from the perspective of “systems thinking,” a twenty-first century literacy that educators emphasize in their instruction throughout the year. So, for instance, when tinkering with a Rube Goldberg machine, or when writing a play, or when designing a game for the field day, educators encouraged students to think of each design challenge in terms of its components, rules, goals, feedback mechanisms, and other aspects of a dynamic system. In doing so, they connect hands-on activity with forms of knowledge that are recognized in various academic and professional contexts.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Realizing connected learning principles in a public school setting is not without its challenges. For one, Boss Levels can be seen as taking time away from preparing for state tests. While Quest hopes its students will score highly on tests, its students are evaluated against students who attend schools that place greater emphasis on testing. If the school cannot produce competitive test scores, many families will not apply to the school and the Department of Education could force it to change its leadership or even close its doors. Given these realities, Quest is under constant pressure to scale back on less canonical offerings such as Boss Level, and it has had to diminish the number and duration of Boss Levels as it has matured.

Additionally, the school has had to educate some parents about the educational value of experiences like Boss Level. Less-privileged families, in particular, have pushed the school to focus more on canonical pedagogic offerings, in part because their children’s options in the NYC school system largely depend on test scores. Further, families from various backgrounds have expressed unease with some of the student-centered aspects of Boss Level. The frenetic, messy, and often noisy character of Boss Levels can appear to some as chaotic and undisciplined rather than as engaging and invigorating.

Quest educators have responded to these challenges by attempting to educate parents about the forms of learning supported by Boss Levels, and over time many parents have come to see, and even celebrate, Boss Levels as important and unique educational opportunities. Educators have also had to make Boss Levels more structured and adult-managed as the school has matured, partly to ease parental concerns.

Despite these challenges, Boss Levels offer an encouraging example of how connected learning principles can be integrated into public schooling. Unlike most canonical schooling practices, Boss Levels organize students’ activity around a shared purpose, and they provide students with numerous opportunities for active and creative problem solving. Students, rather than educators, drive the process. Solutions are not defined beforehand and resources are not bound by the school’s walls. As a result, students have the opportunity to participate in the challenging, messy, collaborative, and open-ended processes that we believe characterize connected learning at its best.

Scientist Profile: Inventor

By Almetria Vaba

Spark your students’ curiosity in engineering and technology by introducing them to the designers, inventors, and clever thinkers featured in PBS LearningMedia. Use their stories to illustrate various themes of study like the engineering design process and the impact of technology.

• DESIGNING A WHEELCHAIR FOR RUGBY

See what happens when a U.S. Paralympic athlete challenges two teams of high school students to build an automated wheelchair. Use this segment to initiate a design challenge in your own classroom. Grades 6-12

• WIND ENERGY FUELS JOBS FOR OKLAHOMA YOUTH 

How can your students affect the world around them? Use this video segment about wind energy to illustrate the real-world impact of an innovative idea. Grades 6-13+

• SCIENTIST PROFILE: INVENTOR 

Get your class excited about great ideas! Introduce them to Ryan Patterson, teen scientist and inventor of an electronic sign language translator glove. Grades 4-6

• KID DESIGNER: A COMFORTABLE CARDBOARD CHAIR

Introduce your class to this industrious young designer who demonstrates how to construct a sturdy chair out of cardboard. Grades 3-12

• A HOUSE FOR A TEDDY BEAR 

See these young learners engaged in problem solving and trial-and-error design! Consider replicating this project in your own classroom to reinforce lessons on design, construction, and experimentation. Grades K-2.

• SID’S AMAZING INVENTION 

Sid believes that he has invented the ultimate solution to putting away his toys, later to learn that his invention is actually a simple machine called a lever. Invite young learners to explore the function of a lever alongside Sid and his friends. Grades PreK-1

Getty Images

Design thinking can seem a bit abstract to teachers. It’s not part of traditional teacher training programs and has only recently entered the teachers’ vernacular.

Design thinking is an approach to learning that includes considering real-world problems, research, analysis, conceiving original ideas, lots of experimentation, and sometimes building things by hand. But few schools have the time or wherewithal to integrate these processes into the school day.

But at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, Calif., a small, private school for grades K-8, design thinking is part of every class and subject, and has been integrated throughout the curriculum with support from a dedicated Innovation Lab or the iLab.

“It’s really a way to make people more effective and to supercharge their innate capabilities,” said Kim Saxe, director of Nueva’s iLab, and one of the champions of design thinking.

At Nueva, students are asked to bring the principles of design to every problem, no matter what age or grade. One fourth-grade design challenge included designing an LED lamp for a family member. Rather than immediately jumping in with ideas about the coolest lamp design, students were told to go home and observe their family members surreptitiously and decide who most needed a new light source. They then had to design a lamp that suited that person’s need and interests.

A sixth grade health-related project required students to work with Kaiser Permanente to improve some of their products. Students interviewed real patients to understand their health experiences and to improve them. “I felt that if they interviewed people with health issues that the kids would get some wisdom from them,” Saxe said. “Rather than being an overt health class it would infiltrate them.” And because students pitched their ideas to Kaiser — not just to the teacher for evaluation and assessment — they took the project very seriously.

[RELATED: What Do Wii Remotes Have to Do With Science?]

Kindergartners are tackling simple design challenges too, learning about materials, and getting a taste of design thinking as part of all their lessons. By third grade the students are actually designing products that have a service component; they research the problem, come up with solutions and design presentations and brochures on their best idea.

The projects teach students how to make a stable product, use tools, think about the needs of another, solve challenges, overcome setbacks and stay motivated on a long-term problem. The projects also teach students to build on the ideas of others, vet sources, generate questions, deeply analyze topics, and think creatively and analytically. Many of those same qualities are goals of the Common Core State Standards, Saxe said. “Design thinking weaves together a lot of the standards that need to be taught in ways that people will really need to use them,” Saxe said.

In addition to classwork, Saxe keeps the iLab open during recess so students can work on their own projects.

ELEMENTS OF DESIGN THINKING

A big part of what Saxe loves about her job is thinking about how to foster each student’s individual creativity, helping them think critically about how and where they get their best ideas. One active student discovered his best ideas came after he’d tired out his body playing sports. Another student found that shutting herself in a closet where she wasn’t affected by anyone else was the most productive.

Saxe has developed a strategy for pulling lots of great ideas from her students, but it runs contrary to the group brainstorming method that many entrepreneurs embrace. Instead, students spread out to a quiet, comfortable space for solo-brainstorming. When they come back into groups each student shares her favorite idea and the group builds on that idea. Then each student shares her wildest idea. “Innovation often comes from some seed of an idea that’s tucked into a wild idea,” Saxe said. The group can help tease out what works and what doesn’t.

Other qualities of great design learning educators include being open and curiosity, the ability to question beyond the facts, a positive attitude, high energy levels, and excitement about interdisciplinary approaches. More than anything, Saxe said the educator should “firmly believe that if you tell an answer to a child you’ve deprived them of a great learning opportunity.”

[RELATED: Recasting Teachers as Designers]

POSSIBLE TO SCALE?

Nueva’s integrated design thinking program might seem impossible to achieve in a public school, but elements of design thinking are easy to implement anywhere, she said. Even at Nueva, which was highly receptive to the idea, implementation was slow. Saxe was careful not to force teachers to incorporate design elements; instead, she offered trainings and helped to plan and deliver lessons. Since the program started in 2007, the school has steadily added design learning elements to all grade levels and subject areas until the iLab and the classroom are woven together.

One of the things that sold design thinking to the faculty was the idea of attempting to solve a real problem and adding an element of making.

[RELATED: Harvard Wants to Know: How Does the Act of Making Shape Kids' Brains?]

“Our faculty loved that design thinking increased student empathy,” Saxe said. “We always have them designing for a classmate or someone in the community, rather than just themselves.” Most often students are trying to solve problems they’ve identified in the life of a family member or in the community around them.

Saxe became a design learning believer because of a personally transformative experience rediscovering her own good ideas. But she recognizes that teaching with design thinking takes some specific qualities. “I think it takes a fair amount of flexibility and resourcefulness,” she said. “They have to be willing to deal with uncertainty themselves. If you are going to let someone go into an area and identify the needs, you have to give up control.”

Educator Jaime McGrath and designer Drew Davies explain how to create a “classroom of imagination” by turning lessons into design problems and giving students space to be creative in this Tedx video. In a New York Times op-ed The MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition’s co-director Cathy Davidson said she thinks it’s possible that 65 percent of students today will end up doing jobs that haven’t been created yet.

McGrath and Davies argue that school needs to keep up with the times by promoting creativity, entrepreneurship, design thinking and hands on skills. McGrath’s experience teaching design problems has convinced him that the approach includes all learning styles, brings the best of project-based learning, encourages cooperation and integrates subject matter horizontally. But mostly, McGrath and Davies are impressed at the cool stuff kids design.

Jon Kalish

By Jon Kalish

Countless kids have grown up with the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts or Campfire Girls, but for some families, the uniforms and outdoor focus of traditional Scouting groups don’t appeal.

In recent months, Scout like groups that concentrate on technology and do-it-yourself projects have been sprouting up around the country. They’re coed and, like traditional Scouting organizations, award patches to kids who master skills.

Ace Monster Toys is a hacker space in Oakland, Calif., where members share high-tech tools. Normally, grown-ups congregate there, working on electronics or woodworking projects. But two Sundays a month, the place is overrun by 50 kids and their parents for the gatherings of a group called Hacker Scouts.

The kids in Hacker Scouts are not breaking into computer networks. They make things with their hands, and at this particular meeting they are learning to solder and are building “judobots,” small robots made out of wooden Popsicle sticks.

“I’ve been sewing on little felt pieces with this,” Davis explains. “The battery will power the LEDs and light up. It’s pretty cool.”

Crafting, Computers And The Physical World

Chris Cook, one of the parents active in organizing the Hacker Scouts, serves as president of the hacker space where the Scouts meet. He says the group has expressly targeted kids between the ages of 8 to 14.

“It’s old enough where they’re ready to start developing skills, [but] they’re not so old that they’ve already been set in their ways,” Cook says, “and they’re more interested in what their peer groups are doing.”

“So, we felt it’s the right kind of time to expose them to how to craft with their hands — how to take things from a computer and put them into the physical world,” Cook says.

The Hacker Scouts don’t wear uniforms, but soon they’ll be able to earn something akin to merit badges, made by the kid-friendly DIY electronics company Adafruit Industries.

Badges range from “learn to solder,” “aerial quadcopter” and “high-altitude balloon” badges to the “Dumpster-diving” badge — “for when you get dirty but get some free stuff,” explains Adafruit founder Limor Fried.

The site awards more than 40 badges for skills ranging from bike mechanic to “special effects wizard,” and has started producing how-to videos for DIY projects, like a shoebox harp made from a box, a pencil and some rubber bands.

“Right now, I really like making paper airplanes and origami,” McFadden says. “I have a whole fleet of paper airplanes.” She learned to make them, she says, using an app on her iPod and by looking online.

A Scouting Handbook For Young Hackers

There are now 32,000 kids registered with DIY.org, which plans to organize local clubs around the country. The website even has an animated anthem exhorting kids to “build, make, hack and grow.”

The site’s chief creative officer, Isaiah Saxon, says the group plans to create the digital equivalent of a Scouting handbook for mobile devices.

“We hope that people’s smartphones are eventually the Swiss army knife of our movement,” Saxon says. “And that you go out into the woods … point your phone at a tree and peel it open [to] learn about the wood underneath.”

Saxon also plans to offer visual guides and “amazing experiences on the fly through these powerful handheld computers,” he says.

As these efforts take off online, the hacker Scout movement is also spreading around the country. Seattle now has a science-focused group called “Geek Scouts,” and a couple of tribes — not troops — of “Maker Scouts” are being formed in Milwaukee and Charleston, S.C.