What makes a great creative STEAM learning activity?
In the past 2 months at pK-12 at MIT Open Learning, grantees of our Day of Climate project are play-testing their curriculum activities.
Some of the questions that have surfaced in the process includes:
- Does this activity tap into learners’ lived experiences?
- Is it inclusive of learners of younger ages, and cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds?
- Is the scientific phenomena being conveyed in an embodied, and maybe playful, way?
PLIX Data Gems, is in part, based on some very serendipitous community connections (Mining for Data Gems ), my many years of data science education work, and my multimodal gesture research I’ve been doing for the past 14 years. (People are multidimensional and have many interests!) I’ve been thinking about different ways to integrate two. So far, my education career has infused pedagogy into my gesture research. My undergraduate researchers have a deep and fulfilling training experience into the research field (after 2 weeks of training, they’re able to beautifully analyze and evaluate hand gestures), and I’ve also worked with collaborators in Europe to put together a training curriculum on multimodal gesture labeling (https://m3d.upf.edu )
Some of the very creative things I do in gesture research 1) deciding on labeling conventions and quantifying the very qualitative aspects of human communication, and 2) imagining, designing, and coding exploratory data visualizations. ( Speech Communication Group )These data visualizations aid the process of investigating patterns in our research data, based on different hypotheses. I find it extremely playful and fun!
Data Gems introduces that process of imagining, deciding, and designing a data tracking experience, motivated by personal data and using familiar materials like beads, charms, and string. At older ages, transitioning into visual data journaling (collecting, tracking, and analyzing) supports deeper reflections and potentially changes in habits towards personal goals.
Other PLIX activities were designed with a different ethos: What’s most exciting about the research that we don’t have yet have answers for? Tapping into researcher curiosities makes the unknown more tantalizing to explore. It means that there’s a very “high ceiling,” since even the “experts” don’t have the answers. In the face of no solutions, researchers employ different methods and practices, and that can be a very creative act.
So, reflecting on your experiences:
- If you’ve had research experience, what was fun about it? What questions remain unanswered in the research field?
- Or, in your personal life, what kind of questions do you seek answers to? How do you find the answers? And how much do you understand other peoples’ process of figuring out the answers?