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 phenomenon in action during the design of a STEAM summer camp for 5th and 6th graders from the 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 bring joy to learning while naturally connecting 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 something they know well (game creation) and new content knowledge can increase the stickiness of all types of 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, and 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 posts 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 post 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. 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 started. 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 with 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 object 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 held up by plastic chairs to EARTH on the Makey Makey.   A ScoreBoard Scratch program was loaded onto the computer. 

** Note: if you notice unexpected behavior from your Makey Makey when set up outside, it might be caused by the ground you are standing on. Put insulating cardboard under the metal bucket. Note that our chairs had a built-in insulator since they were made of plastic. 

Phase 2: Create Confidence

Inspiration creates the want. Next phase - Create Confidence. The Create Confidence phase runs on short, deliberately incomplete lessons in the form of 30 - 45 minute Skill Builders 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 used 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 campers 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 inside, the students rotated between three Create Confidence skill builders.  STEAM fellowship educators also got the opportunity to learn from or practice facilitating skill builders.  I especially loved the powerful questioning techniques that our STEAM fellows used to deepen the learning for our campers. 

The  Micro:bit Skill Builder  created confidence with a student-friendly 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 a 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 an svg file. They also practiced our method for sending files to the Glowforge laser cutter.  They also learned how to use Cuttle.xyz to turn an SVG graphic from the Noun Project into a game piece. 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. 

The  Simple Circuits Skill Builder created confidence with building circuits and switches that turned LED lights off and on.  Students used hexagon tiles they cut from the laser cutter and copper tape to create their switches. We also brainstormed how circuits and switches might be used in game mechanics.   

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 second skill builder demonstrated how to control external components with the micro:bits.  Both of these skills could expand the potential of the micro:bits to be used in game design. 

The confidence created with these skill builders became obvious 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 the afternoon of Day 3, the students were ready for a MEANINGFUL MAKING challenge.

Although neither the Inspire nor Create Confidence phase asks students to make anything of their own yet, these first two phases provided 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 brainstorm 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, the open-ended Meaningful Making 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 tuned for Part 2 -blog post to see the process and Game prototypes our campers made this week during their Meaningful Making studio time.