STEAM CAMP As Professional Development

In a recent blog post, I reflected on the adoption of both the MAKER MOVEMENT and  STEAM in our schools.  I noticed that while the maker movement in our schools bubbled up from curious creative teachers who saw making as a way to engage students with hands-on minds-on learning, STEAM  mostly came down from school leadership looking for a framework that connected to content areas such as Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics.  

Both approaches reveal that our hands and our brains are interconnected, and sometimes,  our hands know before our brain does.  This week I got the chance to see this phenomena in action during the design of a STEAM summer camp for 5th and 6th graders from NCSU Encore program.   VREC (Vermont Rural Education Collaborative) offered STEAM fellowships to four educators interested in learning how they might bring STEAM into their own practice --and what resulted was a week filled with joyful powerful learning by both teachers and students. 

It’s easy to imagine joy in summer camp, but the same joy can (and should) be part of learning throughout the school year. This week gave me a chance to model how game design with STEAM supplies and maker tools can become gateway to integrated STEAM learning that connects naturally to nearly any curricular area. Tweak the prompt slightly, and students could be designing games that reinforce curricular concepts in social studies, literacy, science or math.

Why game design? Obviously games have a built in fun factor. Also, kids are already game experts! Combining game creation and content knowledge increases the stickiness of those new curricular concepts. Game design is also a great vehicle for bringing in the Gold Standards of Project Based Learning. - a sound pedagogical approach for teaching and learning. And when you combine game design with STEAM supplies and maker tools such as circuits, 3D printers, laser cutters, cardboard cutters, you can create a culture of craftsmanship where the students create what Ron Berger (An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students) calls “beautiful works”. So stick with me over the next couple of blog post as we explore how game design can be used to transform most any curricular content into a joyful learning experience where the students own their learning with pride in their eyes. 

During the week long summer camp, I used the same sequence I use across my CREATE MAKE LEARN school based residencies . We started the Inspire, Create Confidence, and Meaningful Making sequence with the essential question "How might we INSPIRE our students and CREATE CONFIDENCE our teachers and students need to MAKE SOMETHING MEANINGFUL?" 

During part 1 of this  blog posts series, I’ll share how we used the first two phases (INSPIRE)  and (CREATE CONFIDENCE) in our learning design, while the next blog post will pick up with what happens when students take everything from these first two phases and use it for MEANINGFUL MAKING and  build something they are inspired to make.

Phase 1: Inspire

Even before the first tool came out, the Inspire phase did the important work of creating motivation needed to engage campers into the learning they would do this week.  We opened Day 1 with introductions and creative light up  name tags where campers built their first circuit.

The STEAM Fellowship educators who joined the camp brought their own middle-grades pedagogical toolkit with them, and they quickly arranged a circle of chairs in the room that could host  a morning meeting, and that same circle formation returned throughout the week at transitions, after lunch, and again to close each day, often with a quick grounding game that got students physically and mentally re-centered before the next activity starts. The circle scaffolded relationships and belonging. They were short, but purposeful. I loved learning new prompts that the STEAM fellowship educators brought to the circle each day.

We quickly moved outside for  a "Four Corners: Game Edition" icebreaker  where students physically sorted themselves by the kind of game they like most: physical, tabletop, video, or card games.  Not only did this take advantage of the beautiful Vermont summer weather we were lucky enough to experience, it also served as a preview  of the different types of games we would be creating this week and that the week would engage both our minds and our bodies. 

While outside, we quickly moved into  an outdoor cat and mouse  physical game built around the use of Makey Makey circuits. Students were inspired by playing  a physical game where they  got to  run around, trigger switches using conductive and insulating objects to reach one of two cheese buckets.  This reminded students of the role of conductors and insulators in circuit design without sitting through a review lecture. 

We started with these game rules, but eventually modified them a bit to fit the dynamics of our group. 

• Your team huddles near its home (Start Zone) 

• Pick 1 person to be your cat. The cat will guard the Danger Zone.
  The rest of you will be mice and huddle in the Start Zone 

• When the Game Master signals “Go” one person from your team will race towards the cheese.  They must cross the Danger Zone without being caught/tagged by the cat  to land in the Safety Zone.  If that cat catches you, you become a cat for the team that catches you. 

• Once in the Safety Zone, they must use an objects they find here to access the cheese  without stepping into the No Trespassing Zone. 

• When you  successfully make contact with the cheese container causing a successful signal to sound, the game master will give you a piece of cheese point.

• REPEAT until all the mice have a chance to try crossing the cheese.  In the last round, the original cat can become a mouse so they get the final turn. 

PreGame Setup by facilitatorrs: 

It required a little setup ahead of time, but it turned out to be a very engaging way to introduce the MAKEY MAKEY Circuit board with lots of movement.   We connected the Makey Makey UP arrow to a metal "cheese bucket" and the DOWN arrow to a plastic cheese bucket filled with water.  (This allowed us to introduce the concept of 'water' as a conductor as well as metal.   We then connected a metal pole to EARTH on the Makey Makey.   A ScoreBoard Scratch program was loaded onto the computer. 

Inspiration creates the want. Next phase - Create Confidence.

Phase 2: Create Confidence

The Create Confidence  phase runs on short, deliberately incomplete lessons  in the form of 30 - 45 minute Skill Builders lessons focused on creating confidence with one new tool or process, no attempt at full mastery. A Skill Builder isn't trying to teach everything about a laser cutter or a circuit board. It's trying to get a student to the point of "I understand enough about this that I could keep learning it on my own or with a mentor  whenever I need to." That's a very different goal than competence — it's a foothold, not a finish line, and it's what lets a student walk into the meaningful making projects later with the confidence to try using  unfamiliar tools. 

On Day 1, we started building confidence with circuits using Makey Makey and FunKey circuit boards.

This first skill builder activity was meant to create a quick win as students plugged their circuit board into their chromebooks and created game controllers from playdough and other materials.

We looked at different "Cat and Mouse" video games created with Scratch, and selected this one as a test for our first game controller.   Using video games created with Scratch to test our game controllers  allowed the campers to see the connection between computer science and game design.  We could quickly "look inside" at the code use to create each game. 

The campers made their first game controller using play dough, then quickly experimented with other materials. 

We then gave campers the challenge of creating a prototype for a retro "Scrappy Joystick". Some used Scratch projects to test their joysticks while others preferred the Makey Makey Selfie-arcade games. 

Our goal for Day 2 was to CREATE CONFIDENCE with simple circuits,  the laser cutter, and  a new circuit board called micro:bit .  We also introduced the MDA of Game Mechanics and focused on TableTop games. 

 

Following our desire to  keep campers moving we introduced the MDA of Game Design with an outdoor game of THIS or THAT.  In our morning circle, we asked kids to name their favorite tabletop game. This list  was used to feed the first round of our THIS or THAT tournament where campers voted on which game had the best Game Mechanics. The beautiful summer weather allowed us to hold the tournament outside and vote with our feet.  The second round asked students to decide which game had the best Game Dynamics, and the last round focused on Game Aesthetics. 

Once back in side the students rotated between 3 Create Confidence skill builders.  Steam fellowship educators also got the opportunity to learn and to lead  each of the new skills. 

The  Micro:bit Skill Builder  created confidence with a new circuit board called Micro:bits. The campers were excited to learn that they would be able to keep their new micro:bit circuit board. We used MakeCode micro:bit tutorial to turn their micro:bit into a dice.  This introduced campers to several important computer science concepts including VARIABLES, RANDOM, and LOGIC. 

The  Laser Cutter Skill Builder  created confidence with using Cuttle.xyz to design assets for our game pieces.  First the students learned how to create a hexagon game tile as a way to familiarize themselves with the process of creating a design file and then our method for sending files to the Glowforge laser cutter.  Then they learned how turn an SVG graphic from the Noun Project into a game piece. 

The  Simple Circuits  created confidence with building circuits and switches that turned LEDs  lights off and on with a coin cell batteries.  Students used hexagon tiles they cut from the laser cutter and copper tape to create their switches and brainstormed how circuits and switches might be used in game mechanics.   See my post on why I think Cuttle.xyz is a game changer for students creating with maker tools like laser cutters, Cricut and other cutters, and even 3D printers. 

On the morning of Day 3 we offered a couple more advanced skill builders using the micro:bits.  One skill builder taught the students how to use the built in radio of the micro:bit to send data to another micro:bit on the same channel.  The students enjoyed coding different features like sound alerts into their micro chat programs.  The next skill builder demonstrated how to control external components with the micro:bits.  Both of these could expand the potential of the micro:bits to be used in game design. 

The confidence created with these skill builders became events as the campers started asking “When can we start building our own game?” We circled up again with a prompt "How might you use what you learned this week to design a game that uses circuits in at least one way?" and sent them out  to brainstorm during an outdoor reflection time. By afternoon the students were ready for a MEANINGFUL MAKING challenge.

Although the neither the Inspire nor Create Confidence asks students to make anything of their own yet- the first two phases played important work by providing students with two key ingredients -- inspiration or motivation and confidence or foundational skills that would lead to craftsmanship and more ideas  as they prepared to brainstorms creating something original

If you skip the Inspire phase the Skill Builders become just another rotation of disconnected tech demos, with no throughline for why any of it matters. If you skip the Create Confidence phase and the open-ended building phase turns into enthusiasm with nowhere productive to go, because nobody has enough command of the actual tools to act on their ideas.

Put them together, in sequence, and something different happens: a student walks into an open-ended challenge already believing two things at once — this is worth doing, and I have what I need to start. That's the setup for Phase 3: Meaningful Making. Stay tune for Part 2 -blog post to see the process and Game prototypes our campers made this week.