Welcome to the Learning by Making video public discussion area! We are just finishing five years of pilot implementation of this exciting and innovative 9th grade STEM curriculum which has been shown to improve science and math performance. We are happy to announce that we received another round of funding  from the US Department of Education to keep improving our experiments and update our hardware infrastructure. Here are some questions for viewers that would help guide our work during the next five years:

1) What type of computers do you use with your students and are they one-to-one or only in specific laboratory rooms?

2) Do you know of any way to properly assess hands-on curricula such as Learning by Making that focus on scientific and engineering design practices and student mastery of electronics and computer programming more heavily than NGSS disciplinary core ideas? 

3) Do you know any high-need rural high schools within ~4 hour drive of Santa Rosa CA that would be interested in adopting our curriculum? We are seeking a few more school or district partnerships for our next cohort. Training would begin in early August 2019, for implementation in your classes beginning in August 2020. We provide travel, training stipends, all experimental equipment, yearly WBL field trip,  technical support and more... Please post if you or a ninth-grade teacher you know may be interested.

An interesting video, thanks for posting it.

   I am curious how you decided to choose LOGO — a language I am fond of, but there are so many other possibilities out there these days!  

    I am also curious about something else:  The Science Ed Field (however defined) has been pushing hands-on, engaging science for a long time (at least since the late 1950s).  How does one find a control classroom for an innovative project like yours, given that the other classes might be using someone else's groundbreaking, hands-on, technology-enriched program?  

I'm curious about the finding from your pilot study that students who typically struggle in class were among those who benefitted the most from LbM.  What is it about your program that you think leads to such positive results with these students in particular?  Thank you for sharing your work and congratulations on the continued funding.

Hi Victor

I have been teaching Sonoma State University's STEM curriculum over the past 4 years.

When students who typically struggle in a lecture type class, usually they are unengaged, sitting there

doing nothing. Not listening, participating, or knowing what's going on.

With this STEM curriculum EVERY STUDENT is engaged- doing the task, wiring, coding, typing.

Rarely will a student sit there doing nothing when everyone else is moving around them.

My STEM classes are typically not college prep, students are not driven, their grades are typically 

not great, they are not passing.  They may or may not be passing the STEM class......but they are

diffidently ALL DOING SOMETHING during class.  They are super proud and excited when the LED

bulbs turn on or the temperature sensors start generating data and graphs!!! 

A few of my most creative art drawings came from F grade students, who got interested in the coding

and creating an unusual drawing or design.

It's very cool to see girly girls wiring.......especially with those Super long, fake nails.

They are doing it!!! And SO excited when the LED light bulb goes ON.

I think it's just the movement in the class. If everyone is just sitting there, a person doing nothing

easily blends. But if everyone is up, out of their seats, cutting wires, generating graphs, then it's easy

to feel like your left out or odd ball, So they feel more inclined to join the Git'er Done Crowd :)

It's super Cool !!!

I'm glad to see a great rural-focused project that is hitting students at the jumping-off point as they begin to choose what they want to pursue through high school and beyond.  Our project (Agricultural Applications of Computer Science) has a lot of similarities, including the development of electronic skills along with programming skills.  Have you felt the need to deal with electronics issues more than programming issues?  How do you minimize the amount of time that students spend staring at wires, figuring our which one isn't right, in order to maximize the time that they get to spend being creative?

As for your questions, 

1) Computers: Our technology varies according to the teacher and school.  Most have 1:1 student laptops or chromebooks, but at least one was just a small class where the students had to borrow the teacher's computer most of the time.  This summer we are introducing Raspberry Pi, giving each teacher 6 sets that include 5" screens, so they will work just like tiny computers.  If students aren't creating projects with the R-Pi's own GPIO pins, they can plug in an Arduino board and run the Arduino IDE to program it.  I'm interested in seeing how this opens up the way that students are able to approach our activities and how teachers are able to support class sizes.

2) Alternative assessments: With our agriculture course focus, we began our outcomes by looking at Career & Technical Education (CTE) course "proficiencies", rather than NGSS standards. We aren't assessing students' overall Making skills (electronics/engineering) in our project, but there are several CTE courses that list really good outcomes for physical programming. We cherry-picked what skills we wanted to focus on, and we're collecting student pre/post scores on a set of programming skills from the "Intro to Coding" course that falls under both the IT and STEM CTE career clusters.  (Your state may have different names for your clusters, pathways, and courses, so you'll have to do some digging on your states Dept. of Ed website and/or find the right people to help you.)  

We considered using Raspberry Pis, but have recently moved from Linux systems on HP Streams to running Linux on Chromebooks. We hope to transition to using a Chrome app with the Arduinos, but the Arduinos will still be using Logo for the student interface.  It will be interesting to see how your students handle the Arduino IDE. In my past experience it has been a daunting challenge that was not able to be met, even by community college instructors who knew the C programming language.

We will definitely look into your assessment approach, as this is an area in which we continue to struggle. Thanks! 

Very interesting! I'm curious whether you looked at gender dynamics in either program implementation or outcomes. (Patricia mentioned observing girls wiring.)

This is a great way to integrate coding and technology into science classes! It is impressive to see these 9th grade students enthusiastically working on projects where they analyze questions and come up with answers. I love that the kids are using simple supplies to study basic scientific questions! I'd love to read more about your program!

What a great project and impressive results! Is this an elective course? Patricia mentioned that the kids who take the STEM course are not the most driven students. What others courses do the control students take?

This course is being taught as an elective in some schools, but as one of the two required prep science lab classes in other schools. In some of our smaller rural schools, all the ninth grade students take this course.  In others, some of the students take the traditional bio/chem sequence instead. We are thrilled at how this is going so far and hope to find more relatively local rural schools to adopt the curriculum for our new study.

What a great program. I would love to integrate this process with students who frequently learn by making as a result of their remote, subsistence lifestyles.

Hi Lynn, Linlin, and team,

I've enjoyed following your work over the years and it was lovely to see your video! It gave me a sense of how students respond to this innovative approach to learning. So empowering!

I was also interested in your comment (and hypothesis) that the Learning by Making approach may have the impact it does because it appears to level the playing field, as the majority of students don't come to the table with relevant prior experience. It makes me wonder if that might also be to your advantage when working with teachers in professional learning too. With our Making Sense of SCIENCE professional learning project, we also talked about the value of leveling the playing field in terms of what experiences and information we make available to teachers. We find when we provide "content notes" with some common definitions and explanations of science concepts, then teachers' participation in scientific discourse increases. More specifically, we observe that teachers who come to the professional learning with little to no experience on a topic (e.g., electric circuits) will reference the content notes and stretch their use of academic language. On the other hand the "knowers" also check their understanding against the content notes and often find they need to refine their language or understanding through discourse. So, I'm just curious how you see that leveling of the playing field play out in the classroom.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation. Cheers!

Hi Kirsten. Let's definitely continue the conversation as we are always eager to improve our PD sessions. It is certainly true that almost all the teachers in our program come in with no programming or electronics experience.

So we would be happy to discuss how we can improve the materials that we are preparing for the teachers.

I value the work these teachers are conducting on behal of STEM education.  I particularly enjoyed Patty Halpin's presentation above

Patty is an amazing asset to our program! Please let us know if you would like more information about the program.

Very interesting project with a well structured design for the student work from question to design, data gathering, etc....  I’m late to this discussion and there have been many excellent comments and suggestions above.  The evaluation results are impressive.  Of course, it would be great if this could scale to more schools and more types of settings so the impact could be measured more rigorously (comparative groups, controls, and longitudinal results).  LOGO, of course, is not an end point but it is well conceived and reinforces structured problem solving, which is critical and hopefully transferable to whatever environment or language used in the future but the students.  Thanks for the clear presentation of the design, project and result.