STEAM Day 2021

Each year Nord Anglia Education (NAE), the parent organization for the Village School, runs a partnership with MIT called the MIT challenge. Each NAE school has the freedom to decide how they'd like to engage with the MIT challenge. This year, we blew away all of the competition. 

The MIT Challenge site serves 3 main functions: 

1) Provide a hub for teachers for information regarding the details of the MIT challenge

2) Allow individual teachers to upload their class plans to a searchable lesson hub. 

3) Digitally showcase student work and completed class projects.

How to foster collaboration?

How do you get 50+ educators from 13 different grades to all tackle the same project? How do you get people excited about adding one more thing to their plate? How do you get high school math teachers interested in elementary art lessons?

The Perfect Storm - What did we do?

For the MIT challenge, the option we chose was all three. 

MIT had allowed Nord Anglia to partner with their meteorology department to show how predictive algorithms can track the future path of a storm. Students were challenged to analyze and evaluate the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes. 

Village admin fully supported the idea of having every class working on a single topic. Students would experience interconnections in course material and the "Arts" in STEAM would be fully visible. While participation was mandated, it was a soft mandate, teachers were given a large amount of flexibility in how much class time and in what direction they wished to approach the topic, and classes were given exemptions depending on the needs of the course. The MIT challenge hub allowed teachers to see what other classrooms were doing and help provide them with inspiration. 

Most importantly, I had the opportunity to meet and talk one-on-one with teachers who were unsure how to incorporate the topics. This led to enlightening discussions about etymology with foreign language teachers and expression with theater arts teachers, guiding elementary teachers on using green screens, encouraging teachers who were struggling to keep up with their curriculum, and modifying video production lessons to fit the new topic. 

Ultimately, we had over 200 classes with over 600  student work exemplars discussing this single topic. Parents and community members were invited onto campus for our largest ever STEAM day. Students presented their work, engineering classes showed off a walk-in wind tunnel painted by middle school art, and the school came together to celebrate an accomplishment of innovation and collaboration. 

Learning for the Future

The MIT challenge and corresponding STEAM day was a huge collaborative accomplishment, one I was proud to have been able to help come to fruition. However, no project is complete without evaluating both where it succeeded, and where it needs to improve. 

The MIT challenge website itself was a solid first step for me in utilizing online databases and presenting them to a larger audience. The program CASPIO was exactly what we needed for quickly building a low budget, low volume database that could integrate into a webpage. For future projects, however, a private sql server and site would be ideal, especially given some of the limited formatting options available with CASPIO.  Personally, I'd like to make the site more mobile friendly, and easier to navigate on mobile or tablet devices, while preserving the search functionality of the original. Integrating more direct collaborative features as well, such as scheduling or timing components could improve its ability to allow teachers to contact each other across divisions. 

From teacher feedback, both students and teachers were generally impressed with the final results; however, many had wished for earlier notice so they could better incorporate the plan into their curriculum at the start of the year, and some still had difficulty viewing student work from the digital, google drive showcase. Teachers also experienced some burnout regarding future STEAM projects - in particular the spring's Innovation Day, and not many teachers persisted in inter-division collaboration during the rest of the year - although attitudes towards collaboration had improved. 

In order to help preserve this accomplishment, art students designed vector graphics that included QR codes now on display in the school's entryway. Now any visitor to the school can scan and see the work put forth by our 2021-2022 Village School students.