Hi Everyone. The Week 3 STEM Guide is upon us and has a ton of new content for us to learn. It frankly has more than you'll have time to learn in a week and it frankly has more than I have time to create in a week. Haha. But the concepts are there and nothing is keeping you from running with whatever topic you might enjoy. But let's get started. You can Download the Guide on the website here.
STEM VS....
Adding to the curriculum this week will be two of my all time favorite educational creations known as STEM vs Wild and STEM vs Sports. We'll be using those concepts this week and beyond to learn STEM in more fun and unconventional ways.
ENGINEERING
Our Engineering lessons will dive us deep into Electrical Engineering. Hopefully by now your student has a basic understanding of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering from our first two weeks of study. If not, there is never a wrong place or time to start learning about the wonderful world of Engineering.
MATH,TYPING,GEOGRAPHY
If there is one area of study my own kids have stayed really consistent on it's been doing their Khan Academy Math lessons each and every day, as well as their Typing lessons using Typing.com. Their other favorite lesson is learning Geography and all 50 states. They are getting close and we'll be ready to move on to Europe this week.
CODING
Le't introduce some Text-Based Coding languages to begin to understand the differences and applications for learning text based coding after we've developed a great foundation with visual or block style programming. Coding can get super tricky and sophisticated rather quickly so there is no expectation that after two weeks of some coding games any student is ready to jump into text based coding. It's great, however, to understand what the opportunities are and how everything works together.
We will also introduce a really fun program where we use code to create music. Stay "tuned" for that lesson.
MAKERSPACE
This weeks Makerspace lesson is one of my favorites. We will be building our own little toy ziplines. It's something we've done here for years and absolutely love doing. I'll create and post a video with the kids later in the week. In the meantime, you can start rounding up some string, that pulley from last week, some toys, and mabe a smal bucket of some kind. We'll throw in Newton's Laws of Motion to really hammer home the science of a zipline.
3D DESIGN and DIGITAL MEDIA
Wow....we could just spend the entire week on these topics. These are actually the topics I work in most of the time by profession so they are always super fun to learn....and teach. We had hoped to add Paint 3D to our arsenal in the past week but we never got to it. We will be jumping right into that this week and using it to not only create cool 3D Models but more artistic and vivid 3D scenes. It's more artistic and "fun" than Tinkercad based on what you're trying to accomplish and we'll discuss that in the lesson. For more advanced student's, dust off those rockets we built last week because we'll be importing them into Blender this week for a basic animation lesson and blasting them off into orbit. Note, you'll need to download Blender for this tutorial.
My goodness, I was just looking over my 48 pages of notes and I have a LOT of ideas to keep throwing at you. I hope you're working hard, I hope you're kids are enjoying some of these ideas and lessons. Reminder, none of this is anything that can be simply learned in one or two lessons. The idea behind this curriculum and all of my classes and camps is to simply introduce and attempt to inspire students with all the incredible learning (and professional) opportunities that await them and are currently available for them to take advantage of. It's a day by day process and an incredible journey. Thank you for working hard with your kids to help inspire them.
Have a wonderful day. And don't forget to squeeze in your general school work in between all the STEM work. ;0) haha
Dustin