Massachusetts STEM Summit 2018

Take your students on an unforgettable, two-month, world-wide STEM adventure with Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s Follow The Voyage – Share The Experience program. Your students will virtually cruise aboard the TS Kennedy with cadets majoring in Marine Engineering, Marine Transportation, and Facilities Engineering who are taking part in their annual Sea Term. Students will also follow the Winter Experiences of cadets majoring in Marine Safety Science & Environmental Protection, Energy Systems Engineering, International Maritime Business and Emergency Management & Homeland Security as they study around the globe.

Administrators, teachers, librarians, and parents will love the comprehensive Follow The Voyage – Share The Experience curriculum linked to the Common Core Mathematics Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. The curriculum also incorporates language arts, social studies, and fine arts. Many of the engaging lessons and hands-on activities were created exclusively for Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

During this session, you will be introduced to the Follow The Voyage – Share The Experience program, discover its history, and view evidence of the program’s success.  You’ll also get a preview of the expanded 2019 Follow The Voyage – Share The Experience program which promises to be bigger and better than ever. We’ll provide the information needed to register a class, a grade level, or an entire school.

Don’t miss Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s one-of-a-kind 2019 STEM adventure on land and sea!

In this session, educators from the Public Schools of Brookline will share a successful interdisciplinary learning experience for 8th graders. Based on Arthur Ganson’s mechanical artwork at the MIT Museum, students integrated learning from science, engineering, visual arts, and technology to create their own kinetic sculptures in a public display of project-based learning. This innovative project brought about high levels of student engagement and achievement.

In this session, we will share details of all stages of this project (including photos and video), from preparation to classroom lessons to the final showcase. The stages include movement drawings, visiting MIT, observational drawings, brainstorming, sketching, building (and persisting), and reflecting. We will share successes, challenges, and lessons learned in thinking about future iterations and implications for our own practice as educators. Time will be built in for questions from attendees. We believe this session would benefit all teachers in grades K-12, with a particular emphasis for middle school. We are hoping that participants would leave with an inspiring opportunity to integrate content in an engaging relevant manner. We also hope the audience would take away the relationship among student-directed learning, persistence, and engagement, and that these skills will remain with students forever.

In this session we talk about the STEM4Girls program, which is a one-day experience at UMass Dartmouth in which girls in grades 3-8 spend the day on campus engaged in STEM activities and talking to STEM professionals. In this session, we will talk about the design of the program and findings from our surveys. We will talk about the structure of the event, approaches that have worked, building partnerships with faculty from across the University as well as local teachers, enrollment in the program, and the design of activities for the participants. We will include testimonials about what STEM4Girls has meant to different stakeholders ranging from the girls who participate, the volunteer college students and the workshop leaders. Then, we will have open discussion with all participants about creating these experiences elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

The 2016 MA Science and Technology/Engineering Curriculum Framework, 2017 MA Mathematics Curriculum Framework, and 2017 Digital Literacy and Computer Science Curriculum Framework, establish a vision for all students. That, all students, regardless of their future education plan and career path, must have an engaging, relevant, rigorous, and coherent pre-K–12 STEM education to be prepared for citizenship, continuing education, and careers. As the STEM Office within the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), we are committed to providing support and guidance to districts and schools that support how they can best engage and support their students in STEM as they progress through the “Pipeline.”

Pre-K–12 educators, coaches, and administrators are invited to learn more about the resources and strategies available, and examples of efforts already undertaken by some districts around providing high quality, rigorous, standards-aligned math, science, and STEM education for their students. During this session, we will highlight the following initiatives:

• Math and Science & Technology/Engineering (STE) Ambassadors Program
• Statewide Networks for Instructional Support
• High Quality Instructional Materials
• Content Specific Feedback
• Administrator Guidebooks

Get comfortable with the engineering design process in your classroom while allowing students to take the rein with NEED’s “Energy House Challenge” activity. Come try your hand at building an energy house, from the purchasing aspect to installation and efficiency. You’ll be investigating the science behind keeping building occupants healthy and comfortable and our buildings energy efficient. Learn about efficiency, conservation and economic returns by using various materials to insulate a cardboard house and then test its efficiency. An excellent activity in applying engineering principals and problem-solving skills to energy efficiency, while incorporating math with a set budget and cost for materials. Students will be able to describe efficiency and conservation measures for the home and justify why these measures make sense economically. This challenge can be easily differentiated for grades 6-12.

The Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering (RISE) project seeks to develop ecologically valid, culturally-relevant integrative science, technology and engineering (STE) preschool curriculum components and home-school connections, forged through exploration of family knowledge, activities, and routines related to STE, to support young dual language learning (DLL) children’s school success. A principal innovation of RISE is the process of co-construction, conceptualized as reciprocal and non-hierarchical engagement by researchers, parents and teachers. RISE was developed and initially implemented in seven Head Start classrooms in a large northeastern city, across two programs serving Latino and Chinese heritage families and their DLL children. We will present the RISE Model of Co-Construction, highlighting the Home-School Collaboration (HSC) component. The HSC component, guided primarily by the work of Joseph Tobin and Luis Moll, is built on the idea that schools can leverage families’ unique contributions to children's learning, rather than trying to overwrite these to get children "ready for school." Essential to our reconceptualization of family engagement is that the home-to-school flow of information is just as important as the school-to-home flow, with a particular focus in RISE on STE learning as the family-school bridge. By effectively connecting children’s familiar knowledge and classroom curriculum, teachers can facilitate powerful learning for children from non-dominant groups (Thompson, 2010). We will present our innovative approach, as well as preliminary evidence of its success, and discuss links to early childhood policy and practice.

The AMP IT UP program is an industry, school, and agency program that provides a day-long mini-externship to STEM teachers in local companies. Teachers observe how the math and science skills that they teach under the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks are applied in the day-to-day activities of these companies. The program includes professional development sequence that embeds the field experience into a resulting lesson extension. As a result, hundreds of students in math, science and engineering classes throughout the north shore are learning about local high tech companies, STEM careers and the importance of mathematics, science and engineering practices.

We will share the professional development model, lesson plan templates and resources developed. Additionally, lesson extension samples will be shared with the group.

Fairy tales give young children a safe way to explore the world and grapple with the conflict between good and evil. They also inspire curiosity, creativity and problem-solving, making them a natural fit for the STEAM classroom. In this session, you will be introduced to the ways you can integrate disciplines to create a more powerful learning experience for K-2 students.

Children are born curious about the natural world. Early childhood settings are the perfect environments to harness this curiosity by encouraging questioning and problem solving using principles of engineering. By supporting children as they navigate the principals of engineering, we are priming the pipeline for STEM success. Despite prior research that shows a STEM curriculum that integrates the engineering design process (EDP) encourages cognitive development and child curiosity, there is very little organized STEM or engineering instruction within early childhood classrooms. Some reasons for this include lack of preschool teacher preparation in STEM and a shortage of available early childhood STEM and engineering curricula.  This presentation will offer participants the opportunity to understand how to infuse dynamic STEM opportunities into their own preschool programs by learning about Worcester Head Start’s STEAM initiative and STEAM kits.  Participants will also learn about Head Start’s partnership with Worcester Polytechnic Institute on a federal grant to develop a problem-based preschool STEM curriculum, Seeds of STEM, which exposes preschoolers to engineering vocabulary and an adapted engineering design process.

How can we engage students through the design and use of STEM learning spaces across grades K through 12? This session is centered on a presentation of initial findings of a review of best practices for K-12 STEM learning spaces commissioned by the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). The review is looking at K-12 academic STEM learning spaces, including elementary classrooms, science labs, and makerspaces, to provide recommendations for the sizing, configuration, outfitting, management, maintenance, and use of STEM learning spaces. Panelists will reflect on the importance of thoughtful STEM space design, the affordances and limitations of design for STEM learning opportunities and programming, and potential implications of initial findings. Participants will consider and reflect on how their STEM space design enables or limits local STEM programming and goals.

The Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering (RISE) project focuses on the purposeful engagement of preschool teachers and children in both the explanation-seeking behavior of science and the problem-solving behavior of engineering and technological endeavors. Specifically, RISE seeks to develop ecologically valid, culturally relevant integrative science, technology and engineering (STE) preschool curriculum components and home-school connections (HSC), forged through exploration of family knowledge, activities, and routines related to STE, to support young dual language learning (DLL) children’s school success. Three Head Start teachers will provide brief presentations about how their curriculum concerning the concept of Living vs. Non-living Things unfolded. These presentations will provide the audience with clear examples of how curriculum implementation can align with, yet vary within, larger national and state frameworks, how a co-construction approach to PD can empower teachers and families, and how evaluation of curriculum and PD programs can measure fidelity to an approach rather than fidelity to a specific curricular script. Implications for application in other settings will be discussed, especially as relevant for informing culturally inclusive curriculum.

Come play with the KIBO robot! Get hands-on with this screen-free coding and robotics kit for children in K-2 classrooms, while you hear ideas for integrating these activities within existing curriculum. We’ll share how easy it is to integrate robotics within the classroom to engage young students to learn STEAM concepts. Using K-2 classroom examples, like our first-grade students using robotics to drive home science learning initiatives, such as wind and weather instruction. Barbara Tennyson, an experienced STEM teacher and technology integrator, will share examples of using robotics to support in-class curriculum as well as meet computer science and digital literacy standards. Learn how to incorporate robotics into your existing classroom instruction to emphasize lessons with hands-on play!

North Andover’s Public Library and Elementary Schools have each received grants to expand STEM resources available to students, educators, families, and the greater community. These resources include manipulatives that encourage learning through play and experimentation while developing a coding and engineering mindset. This workshop will give K-12 educators practical advice in creating a partnership between organizations and give educators the opportunity to explore new or deepen existing partnerships with local organizations.

Participants will learn about the collaborative efforts of these seemingly disparate groups and how they have used STEM materials across the curricula. Presenters will bring manipulatives and engage attendees in an interactive demonstration of how STEM materials were incorporated into a lesson on poetry. Examples of effective ways students have demonstrated their learning using STEM tools will also be shared. Attendees will have access to lesson plans to download.

At the conclusion of the session, participants will brainstorm possible partnerships and how they can use these ideas in their own roles. Additionally, they will have hands-on time with manipulatives such as robots, circuits, and building materials.