Creating

Our STEM Maker Fest is the day after tomorrow. Today, one of our group of students who has been working on their project for hours and hours during and after school for weeks got everything up and running. They built a robot from the ground up. It’s a tank with a t-shirt canon on it. They got some help from the robotics team on the programming, but did the majority of the work themselves. Judging by the crowd they drew in the hallway while testing today, they are going to be very popular at the Maker Fest. They even contacted Chik-fil-A for t-shirt donations to shoot from the cannon. So proud of these kids who have been working so hard to make this event a success. Two of the students in this group didn’t have a technology class this year. However, from this project alone they learned much more than most students learn in a year. If you wonder if Maker Ed and Project Based Learning really has a place in schools, you need to see this process in action. This is inspired learning that goes outside of the classroom to real skills that are valuable in today’s society. Give kids a chance to tinker and make! Trust me; you’ll be amazed with what they come up with!

The T-shirt cannon tank is a go for #stemmakerfest

A video posted by @janellewilson on May 14, 2015 at 7:31am PDT

Our STEM Maker Fest is on Saturday. This weekend, one of my students made this video to encourage students from our feeder middle school to attend. It’s a great video. What’s really cool? She didn’t have to make this awesome video. She decided to make it of her own initiative because she really wants the middle school kids to know about it and attend. It’s just another great example of why I love Maker Ed!

Today we really dived into our gas laws unit. I started today’s lesson by reviewing some basic shapes to help with drawings when using sketchnotes. Mike Rohde outlines these in TheSketchnote Handbook. Almost anything can be drawn in sketchnotes using a rectangle, circle, triangle, line, and dot. We also looked at techniques for drawing people, faces, and type. We created an appendix in our sketchbooks for these techniques. There were a couple of questions about why we were learning art techniques in a science class, but overall, students were really positive.

Before I started the actual lecture on sketchnotes, I reminded students not to worry about the details or information they were really familiar with from the material. Instead, the big idea of sketchnotes is to focus on the big ideas.

When I began going through the lecture section of class, I went rather quickly. Some students were still in the habit of trying to get every word written down. I had to remind them again that they didn’t need to write everything down but rather focus on the big ideas. I was a little worried that perhaps they weren’t getting it, but I should not have been concerned!

I had a chance to go around and check out the student drawings while they were working some practice problems. I was really impressed with what I saw. Most students were really engaged with the information, and their notes looked amazing. I also noticed that some students said they would need to back and finish their notes later because they had details to add. Other students were using the notes handout I passed out near the end of class to supplement the notes they had taken and add in information they had missed. I hope this is a good sign that students will continue to interact with their notes long after class is over.

See the gallery below for all of the awesome student sketchnotes and check out the entire project gallery on Flickr.

If you have been following the blog the past month, you know that I have been brainstorming a way to bring sketchnotes/doodling/art journaling to my chemistry classroom. This is a concept I would really like to incorporate next year, so I am piloting it with one of my classes for our last unit of the year.

A week ago, I passed out simple bound books to my students (our “sketchbooks”) and asked them to decorate the covers by Thursday (yesterday). When students got to class yesterday, I asked them to start by walking around the room and looking at each others decorated covers.

I spent the next part of class explaining my big idea for sketchnotes. There is actually a lot of great research supporting the use of doodling in the classroom (like this article from LiveScience that explains Doodling May Draw Students into Science). Next, we watched a short video from Mike Rohde explaining the Sketchnote process. After that, I had a short discussion with students to hear their initial thoughts. The biggest concern students had was making sure they had all of the details of the notes. Since Sketchnoting focuses on the big ideas, they were worried they would miss a detail that would be important for an assessment. Except for that, students seemed pretty open to the idea. I had already anticipated that this would be a concern, so I was happy to tell them that they would receive a packet of completed notes for the unit. (We usually do cloze style notes.)

After watching a longer video of the Sketchnoting process in action, students were ready to try it themselves. They were starting to realize that the visual elements did not require a lot of drawing skill. It is more about doodles and lettering. For our first challenge, I displayed the two standards we will be covering this unit.

• 13b. calculate temperature, pressure and volume of gases using Charles’ Law, Boyle’s Law, and Gay-Lussac’s Law
• 13e – use concepts of the mole and Avogadro’s number to calculate the molar volume of gases (GPS)

I then asked students to interpret the standards using sketchnotes based on their prior knowledge and what they thought the standard meant. It was a great way to preview the content of the unit and for students to uncover things they already know.

In the slideshow, you can see some of the decorated covers and initial sketchnotes from students. I think they look amazing for just beginning. I am looking forward to seeing how this plays out. Many students were really excited to have the chance to draw and doodle and were asking if the process could be applied to other classes. Students even suggested I should do this with my students next year!

I am also participating with my students. I think it’s a good idea to model something new (or even well known). I’ve found that students are much more likely to buy in to your crazy ideas if you do it along with them. It shows students that you think it is important enough to do, too. I am so excited to see where this journey takes us, and I hope you’ll continue to follow along!