If You Build It, They Will Come: STEMPalooza hits Jordan/Jackson

Shoeless Joe told Ray Kinsella in the classic movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come.” A similar mantra occurred in our school building, if you build it, they will come. Our colleague, Jenn Keller, had a brilliant idea to create a month-long event for our school called STEMPalooza. Her idea was to continue to build a rich STEM culture where all students had access to at least one STEM activity during the month of February. Work done will be shown off at our school-wide STEMPalooza Showcase in March.

This kind of risk-taking Jenn took allowed her to build a team last summer of invested and passionate educators. Working collaboratively, the team created a Google Site composed of rich STEM tasks for grades 3-5 that could be integrated across the content area. The STEM Squad kicked off the event at a staff meeting, providing time for educators to go through the site and choose activities or ask questions about the work ahead.

I chose to do the NCAA basketball challenge since we do the book bracket challenge in March. I spoke with our health teacher about joining us, and she was thrilled to be included. She planned to do a lesson on heart rate when activity is increased using the resting state, walking, jogging, running upstairs, and dribbling a basketball as examples.

The BIG DAY came. Students were excited, and a buzz was in the air. We started off our activity by thinking about if newspaper can hold a basketball. Students made predictions and discussed with classmates. We watched a basketball being tossed through the air and shared where the science was in the toss. Words like force, distance, speed, and gravity were shared. Students headed to the STEM lab, assigned to a group with an NCAA college basketball name. They had to use the engineer design process to create a tower that held a basketball for 20 seconds.

Students were engaged for three hours. They were clear communicators, as observed by our math coach who came to support us. Some groups used their failures to help guide their planning, being flexible in their thinking. The best part of all, they asked if we were going again for another STEMPalooza activity. I am so proud of our colleague for encouraging us all as the students reap the benefits.

I captured our experience in an Adobe Spark to share with parents so they could discuss STEMPalooza at home.