4/29 Prepping for STEAM Night

Its crunch time this week getting ready for STEAM night, basically the Science Fair, on Wednesday.  The kids had voted last week to ambitiously attempt three different activities at our table.

• Dots and Boxes game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_and_Boxes
• Travelling Salesman Problem:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
• Present the 3 related problems from a few weeks ago:  Link to writeup

So my plan for today was to go over how we would handle each of these activities and create posters and handouts for all of them.

Going into the process I wasn’t worried at all. How long can it take 17 kids to make 3 posters?  As a result I brought some cool down puzzles in case we finished early.   It turns as usual I was worried about the wrong thing. We just barely had enough time to get everything done and its good that I dove ride into our main focus.

What I liked about today was everyone was very involved.  We don’t often do a week focused on producing a final product which gives the day a different feel. I occasionally asked kids to go help on a poster station that was falling behind.  Since, I have a reasonable idea about who is good at following through in teams and/or has strong graphic skills I was mindful about nudging various kids to distribute the talent around especially as I tracked where each group was.

I was also pleased that when the kids did go off track, they were distracted doing the activities rather than making the materials for them.  The Dots and Boxes in particular worked that way and I had to remind everyone about our deadline and to not just play dots and boxes.   That’s totally fine in my book.

Ultimately, we finished all 3 of the posters.   I’m leaning very heavily on the kids to drive this process and to man the stations tomorrow night.  The posters are very much kid generated and designed as are the activities. So far I’m very pleased.  We’ll see how the actual event goes but it is turning so far to be a nice variation on the type of activities we do with more options that normal for student initiative.