Christa Flores's Blog

Ask…. and ye shall answer your own questions

“I hope to apply a strong focus on place-based making and science while here in Atlanta...I also noticed that this year's research panel was very program and project focused, or more practical in nature. This gives me hope that higher education is stepping up to the plate to support and study best practice around making in community programs in ways it has not in the past.”

The above is a reflection from FabLearn 2016 from a prompt given to the FabLearn fellows by our mentor Sylvia Martinez. How would I apply FabLearn lessons to my new role as a K-8 outreach manager at Georgia Tech within the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC)? CEISMC is a self-contained K-12 STEM education research and design hub that has been around for twenty years. Lately, CEISMC has caught the MakerEd bug and I was hired to bring my experience to their partner K-12 schools wishing to start maker programs or makerspaces. I no longer have a makerspace of my own. I am answering my own call to arms post Fablearn. I have shifted from being a teacher/researcher or makerspace coordinator to a curriculum and learning space co-designer, working with multiple educators in multiple disciplines, at multiple public schools, one in an “up and coming” or gentrified neighborhood, and one within an area of concentrated poverty and segregation. This blog is focused on the latter school.

Every learner deserves a space to go to every day that will expose them to the beauty of the world and the intrepid explorer that they truly are. How can learning spaces cultivate this goal while encouraging constructive autonomy in the youngest of learners? Two spaces that I have had the pleasure of visiting have shed some light on that question. The first stop was San Francisco Brightworks and the second the Beam Center in Brooklyn, NY.

The idea that each individual should learn through direct experience rather than direct instruction is one so obvious to real scientists that the Latin phrase Nullius in Verba, which translates to 'take nobody's word for it' was adopted in 1660 as the official motto of The Royal Society of London. According to The Royal Society's website, the motto was adopted as “an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.” A scientist is a constructivist by nature and profession, but when would constructionism take root in schools?

When we remove the white coat of inquiry we are introduced to a world of stories of practicing artists and scientists that have blurred the lines of these seemingly disparate disciplines. These stories inspire us by revealing the long standing history of how science has influenced art movements and individual artists. In this section we will look at the role of materials as a rich and natural intersection for the practice of art and science in harmony. We will hear a story of a how the science of the mind influenced a modern art movement and we will also examine the value of art as a powerful catalyst for inquiry for scientists of all ages. Thanks to the maker movement and the merger of art with STEM, we are seeing a witnessing a new horizon of Material Science and Making. 

In 2011, I became the 5th and 6th grade science teacher at the Hillbrook School (Los Gatos, Ca). That same year the school undertook an audit of the science program for areas of strength, as well as areas for improvement. Simultaneously, the Next Generation Science Standards, emphasizing problem solving and engineering, had just been released, and that spring (2012), I attended my first Bay Area Maker Faire. After reviewing the available research on teaching and learning, attending workshops such as FabLearn at Stanford, and the Innovative Learning conference at the Nueva School, I was inspired to bring more engineering and design into the science curriculum. To learn how to do this well, I consulted with experts, such as Ed Carryer of Stanford’s Smart Product Design Lab (learn more about SPDL in Tony Wagner’s book Creating Innovators), to learn more about the use of prompts for semester long engineering projects. By the 2012 school year, I felt ready to prototype the new 5/6th grade science curriculum, now renamed Problem based Science. Problem based science (PbS) encourages students to gain a love of scientific thinking, applied math, and the creative use of technology, while learning through the lens of invention, design thinking, fixing and tinkering. Now in its fourth year of researched-based development, this blog describes how problem based science differs from traditional middle school science classes (i.e., how I used to teach) and lists the four core units of the curriculum. While these units currently make up only the 5th grade science curriculum at Hillbrook, the units are designed to be open ended enough to be applied to any age/grade level with varying degrees of content detail, technology integration, and design challenge difficulty.