Students break into groups to create their own ‘sea turtle friendly’ light fixture out of an assortment of materials. They must work together to design, test, and improve upon their product while considering implications like cost, durability, and safety.
find a way to tailor esoteric research practices to curricula designed for students who are oftentimes in 3-8th grade. In addition, we have to be able to give the teachers all the resources they need to be able to teach such specific topics. For example, in order to teach about extrapolating data, we introduce it in a way that is both relevant to students and easy for teachers to teach. Students will be asked to count the number of students in the class with brown hair. Then blonde hair. We then take those numbers and have them estimate how many students in the 3rd grade may have these hair colors by multiplying their class numbers by the amount of classes in this grade level. While it will not be extremely accurate, we’ve just explained data extrapolation while teaching both science and math.
Student Engagement
Most importantly, we have to think of how engaged the students will be when carrying out these lessons. If the answer is “not very much”, then everything that is created, no matter how important, will fall on deaf ears. Thinking like a 3rd grader often comes in handy at this point. For many of our lessons, we find things that excite students and use those things to teach our lessons. We utilize things like the Engineering Design Process where students break into groups to develop their own sea turtle-friendly light fixture. They must use certain items like tissue paper and aluminum foil while following a budget. They must then test these light fixtures by illuminating their bulbs to see if they’re effective. From here, they must re-design their prototypes to be even better. While it may sound simple, students are self-driven, have group conversations about what the best practice is based on what they know, and have an end goal to work toward. At the end of the lesson, students have