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
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SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 68 NO 4