STANSW Science Education News Journal 2019 2019 SEN Vol 68 Issue 4 | Page 32

ARTICLES Teaching and learning STEM in context at Belrose Public School (continued) Project Mechanica the Mechanica lifeforms from the text descriptions. These images were returned to the stage 3 students and used as a blueprint for the model designs. Writing task Students were tasked with writing their own entry for the book. This required inventing their own Mechanica-style organism and describing it in detail. Helpful questions to guide students’ thinking included: Design process The actual creation of the models was based on students’ investigations and implementation of the Stanford Design Process (Figure 3) that continued over a semester. Following this model was a totally different style of learning to what the children were used to, and it “worked beautifully”. – What type of life form is it? – Where did the life form arise? – What does the life form look like? – What type of environment and specific habitat does it live in? – What special features (adaptations) does the life form have to help it survive? Students had to write the text description following the appropriation of genre used by Lance Balchin, of the text including the setting, characterisation and text structure, and include technical language appropriate to the Mechanica world. The students developed success criteria by deconstructing modern field guides of animals. They concluded that the description would need a description of the animal, its power source, how it interacts with the world, its original purpose before evolution, and how it evolved. They also included the need for appropriate technical language, and grammatical features to match the mentor text. Fig.3 – Steps in the Stanford Design Model (https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thinking- bootleg) Design challenge The emphathise phase involved students spending time building an understanding of what they were being asked to do. They then defined the problem in their own words and ideated possible ways to construct the models from the photoshop images. Base models were prototyped and tested over and over again. During the process students gave up, motivated each other to rethink and rework their designs over and over again until they were satisfied with the design or ran out of time. There was a timeline for completion, the models had to be ready and set up on the night of the museum as an unbendable, hard deadline for Education Week. Next, students were challenged to design and make life size models of their Mechanica-style creations. The brief presented to the students was that their prototypes needed to:- • Have 2 degrees of movement; • Prepresent their lifeform; • Interact with its environment (this was only able to be completed with the Hummingbird robotics using distance sensors etc to activate the coding for the robotic to activate; also some students used Makey Makey’s to create interfaces using guidelines on the author’s website (https://www.mechanica. com.au/). This was a major undertaking that involved multiple aspects and focused work incorporating a range of learning areas. Equipment A major issue was the sourcing of materials for the creation of the models. Masses of cardboard were used as a sustainable element. Tools included a Stanley knife, glue gun and tape as real world elements. Ways of working with the materials could be improved, much sticky tape and lots and lots of hot glue were expended. To create a further robotic aesthetic some students even incorporated broken-up pieces of computers. Peer mentoring Working with a local high school, these students sent their book entry descriptions to year 9 students using Google Classroom, a free web service for schools (https://www.google.com). Then the year 9 students used Adobe Photoshop to create images of 32 SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 68 NO 4