Hi Daniel

The guitar project is the most flexible project that allows students to put their own spin towards a final product. When it came to color schemes and looks, we noticed that many students designed the look of their guitars based on their cultural backgrounds and personal interests.  We wanted to expand this opportunity for students to be able to draw from their cultural backgrounds and personal interests when designing the look of their guitar. So this year, we encouraged students to think of ways that they could connect the design of their product as a representation of themselves or their personal interests.

There were some very diverse and beautiful product designs that resulted from this opportunity.  A common trend of guitar design products from our students were flags painted on as the face of the entire guitar body. The most common flags we have seen designed within the body of the guitar are flags of student's country of origin and LGBTQ flags. We go through a research and exploration phase, reviewing guitar shapes, graphics, colors and finishes that students may want to incorporate in their design decisions and plans. 

We primarily target dual enrolled students for our classrooms and we decided to extend our reach to these students by offering a free guitar building workshop to high school faculty located in the rural areas that we serve. We did this as a way to strengthen our partnerships with the teachers who work directly with our prospective dual enrollment population. Our goal is to increase high school faculty knowledge of project-based learning and awareness about our program by giving them an opportunity to experience the course as the students do. We encourage faculty to place their guitar products on display in their classrooms as a recruitment tool for our program. We also partner with TRIO programs such as Upward Bound. We use their summer enrichment program period to enroll these students in a summer section of our course to receive college credit. 

We discovered that including students along with faculty in workshops that were planned for faculty professional development was such an awesome experience.  Often the students were helping us (they were a lot faster at picking up certain things).  And it built such a great collaboration and comfort with faculty and students that ended up helping in other aspects of academics for the students.

That is so very true. I often find myself learning a new way to do a task from my students.

Hi Sally

We just had our first STEM guitar building workshop this spring with teachers and a major area that was highlighted was the interdisciplinary nature of the project. As we worked through the project, our goal was to intentionally foreground the disciplines that we were currently using towards designing our guitars. We did this for teachers to engage in identifying opportunities to integrate their own background knowledge in math and science as a team, to help expand the project with new perspectives from other faculty. For K-12 teachers, we  foregrounded each design phase of PBL as we progressed through the project using the PBL Works essential design elements. We are looking forward to following up with our participants to see if they have adapted the model in some of their classes.

I agree with the strategy you mentioned for reaching students who are reluctant to sign on. We serve rural towns where everyone knows each other. I think that reaching out to families and teachers will help us to leverage those tight-knit relationships within the community for recruitment of the program.

Hi Mark,

I am very interested in having students create video artifacts of their work. We have been experimenting with Vlogging as a way for students to reflect on their projects from week-to-week. Although students are immersed in the Tiktok/Youtube generation, I noticed that they were at first reluctant towards using Vlogs within our Canvas platform for the project. As students used this form of technology more often for learning, the quality of their Vlogs improved. I wonder if we situated the Vlog activities within the platforms that students are already comfortable with using like Tiktok/Youtube, how would this increase engagement? This is a unique opportunity that is worth exploring. Thanks for your thoughts.

I really do like the idea of having students create a video artifact as part of the conclusion of the experience.  It would be great for building a video-portfolio of student work.

I agree with others, great project!  And, building off Mark's idea of including students.  I wondered if it was possible/worthwhile to try and include students who have completed projects as mentors to other classes/cohorts.  I also thought it was great that some students hadn't used tools in a technical way and then had a great project to show for it.  That made me wonder about how their technical skills grew and if you focused/studied that aspect.  

Hi Jennifer 

Thanks for interacting with the video.

I think that we have found some value with keeping the videos available for each phase of the project. Having a repository of videos allowed several of our students who ventured ahead or who have fallen behind in the project to continue progressing through tasks independently. So I do think that the blended part of the course will stay in tact. 

In face-to-face class, some students relied on watching the task on laptops at their workspace then performing that same task; which gave them more control over the pace of their work. Students who preferred to stay in-step with the instructor did so. But at some point through the project, all of the students end up in different phases of the work. When this happens, having video available as a reference does free me up to work with students one-on-one or in smaller groups.

Then there are another group of students who mostly rely on instruction from instructors/peers to help them through certain tasks in the project. I think the use of the video depends on the support needs based on the  abilities of the person who chooses to use them. My students who chose to use the videos all had varied reasons for doing so.

Our intent is to make sure that students have multiple means of representation of the content, so that they can have more than one type of opportunity to achieve access in understanding how to execute the design tasks assigned in the class. I think UDL checkpoint 3.3 is what were trying to embrace with the video support by chunking our work tasks into smaller sequences in a progressive way.

Paul, I ask that you keep my email available and keep checking with me as this project progresses. We are shooting for our camps to begin in summer of 2023. We'll have better information as we move through our work. shellie.banfield@sfcollege.edu I look forward to continuing to communicate with you with regard to our GRRATE project and other NSF projects.

Hi Chanda

Thanks for your response to this project. 

Each of the rural hubs offer at least 1 of the 3 sections in either Guitars, Rocketry or Robotics. We rotate the sections to a different rural hub each semester so that students have opportunity to take a new section. Instructors do have flexibility in the way that they present lessons in the course and we encourage it. Faculty members that took the recent guitar workshop were mostly math and science instructors. We encouraged them to look for opportunities to integrate their own content knowledge into the projects and to share ways they could expand our existing lesson plans. Currently we are extending access to this program outside of our dual enrollment population through a 2-week summer camp experience for high school students in our areas. Our Summer Institute Camps will begin in 2023.

We have also partnered with Upward Bound's 2022 Summer enrichment program where we will provide an 8-week course in robotics and STEM guitar building for these students. Please reach out if you have more questions about our project. I or Shellie Banfield will be happy to help anyway we can.

Wow! I am familiar with Upward Bound and it is great that you all are working to expand your programs to reach a broader audience. I will definitely be in touch and I might have to take a trip down to Sante Fe College!