Implementing STEM days in your school with NDSCS

On Tuesday January 13th. during their regular noon meeting at Prante's members heard from Kristin Brevik from the North Dakota State College of Science (NDSCS) STEM Outreach group.  The group seeks to aid secondary schools assess twenty-first century skills and implement a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program at their school.  The STEM programs seek to prepare students for twenty-first century jobs and let them know the nature of the new jobs out there.  Ms. Brevik explained the stakeholders in the program: community; job force; administration, teachers, and students.  The fundamentals are collaboration, team management, communication and critical thinking. The program is directed at the Middle School level and all students are involved.  Within this frame work the students (not teachers) meet for the day and set out a plan to solve an everyday problem naming a project manager, engineers, media people and other jobs needed.  There are only three times during the day that they are allowed questions (this is to prevent the "where is my pencil" type questions)  Once they have their work done they present it to the "company board" made up not of teachers but of community business people who question and assess the work (teachers are excluded to remove the bias of a teacher who knows a student does "C" work thus the student does "C" work).   If it is a small community without a lot of business people and engineers then Ms. Brevik has access to NASA people; something that blows the kids away when they show up. She has also set up a "board meeting" with business and engineering people via Skype. Students work on three problems (October; December/January ad March) through the year ranging from oil spills; texting while driving (reaction times); school nutrition; contamination; energy efficiency and knee joints. NDSCS has been doing the project for four years and are now in several area high schools.  Each September there is a project launch and Pre-Survey with wrap up and Post-Survey in April.  They are starting to develop data that shows how the STEM days are helping students in these schools and some teachers have adopted the STEM methods to their regular classes.

                                                             Kristin Brevik