Last week I attended the Indiana STEM Education Conference at Purdue. It is a very quick day.

There was a keynote, session, vendor hall, session, lunch, 2 sessions and done. There were about 60 sessions to choose from, often several in the same time slot to attend. It is a good idea to take a team to the conference so you can divide and conquer and get to all the sessions of interest. Then make sure on the way home or back at school that you take time to talk about everything.

I attended a “Green Our Planet” session on their work with incorporating gardening & hydroponics into the classroom. They have STEM content and 1:1 coaching (I do not know the cost). Their main office is Las Vegas. They hold two “Giant Student Run Farmers Markets” out there and hope to help others across the nation.

Session two I went to  “micro-hydroponics” by ITEEA . Think 6 qt, shoebox size, and utilizing a microbit to monitor water and activate a pump.

The third session was by Randy Jordan and how he reprocesses HDPE (#2 plastic). He has made many things in his experiments (plates, bowls, cups, clip boards…). He is not working large scale, just a good shredder (milk jugs are best for this because they have “flat” sides) , cookie sheet, parchment paper and an oven set to 315 F.. The plastic doesnt so much “melt” as it gets workable. It can be cut & drilled like wood.

The final session I went to was nextech about some general AI ideas.

The day goes by too quickly and there really wasnt much time to chat with people

No, not really.

We did 3 days of electricity with 4th graders at Unionville Elementary. We talked about energy and electrical energy (& chemical & solar & heat…), batteries, conductors, insulators, transformation…A bunch of Q & A (not always directly related..but that works still). They each got several 5 mm LED’s and a CR2032 battery and had the task of lighting one bulb, then they could explore with multiple bulbs. We had discussions on the “correct” way to light an LED (long leg to +) and how they would remember that. A new explanation was that the battery was a small circle on one side and bigger circle on the other side, so the small leg went to the small circle. (AWESOME!)

On Day 2 we got to use copper tape to make a simple circuit, then a parallel circuit. Some had to be reminded of yesterdays work with multiple bulbs, how not all colors work together. Yes, there is a series circuit on the sheet, but we didnt have time today.

Day three we did the real fun part, a light up card (I know, I skipped the series circuit – but they will be doing more with circuits later on). I had some snow people printed for them to choose from. They were supposed to pick 1 (one) thing to light up, but some had to choose 2. They needed to put a dot on the inside of the “card” where the light went, then draw the path for the copper tape. I went around and checked paths and corrected a few. They could color their snowman scene if they wanted, and most did. There was lots of excitement in the air when they got them to work.

link to 8 snow people
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F8YCh6Daa83jBVurOydydS3IY87h9NYf/view?usp=drive_link

link to 3 circuits on 1 sheet
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v5z_rfu-4-ozmaNzWIJ5BfklhWllLy6A/view?usp=sharing

makerspaces.com has nice templates where you make a switch out of brad & paperclip (firetruck, police car, stop light, school bus

We had some pretty good numbers for 2024 , even though we were off for almost 1.5 months of summer when the grants funds didnt line up.  We had to cancel a few events then and had stopped scheduling because of that possibility. I was hoping Summer 2024 was going to entail a breakthrough in having “maker camps” – maybe 2025 will, as we have funding for most of 2025.

We worked with just over 5400 students and 1400 adults (2023 was ~5000 total).
We did 59 student focused events at schools and 29 educator events. We also participated in 26 community events.

The community events are a great way to get in front of/interact with/be seen by a large number of people of all ages, in addition to spreading the message of Maker Education and STEM in general. For example, Tinkerfest is about 150 people, Peden Farms 300 +, Safe Trick or Treat ~1000.

Kids like making stuff – let’s help them do that

I have high expectations for 2025 with current consistent funding (and we always need more to continue AND expand the mission….so if you know anyone…)
Though 2025 has gotten off to a snowy start as a week of activities got canceled as schools were closed.

Recently, I was in need of some grid paper. Not x-y graph paper, but paper with squares and dots on it. And I wanted 11×17 capability. There are many online where you can choose what grids/dots you want , then download and print. Here are a couple :

https://print-graph-paper.com/

https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/

This second one has a great variety of paper layouts, and is where I got an iso-dot paper (but only 8.5×11)

I believe it is Chris Woods (dailySTEM ) who has suggested that you should always have a stack of grid & iso dot paper handy for kids to randomly sketch ideas.
I agree

I also came across a virtual grid paper drawing tool…

https://virtual-graph-paper.com/

and a cool virtual isometric drawing tool (from Chris’ website)

https://www.nctm.org/tools/mathresources/NCTM_IsoDrawing.html

Eastern Green Middle School 6th Graders are reading The Last Beekeeper

I took my cardboard tools, assorted cardboard and craft materials (pipe cleaners, craft sticks, straws, coffee stirrers, buttons, pom poms, batteries & bulbs)) to them. Their task was to make something important from the book.

They were new to the cardboard tools, so those were a big hit. They were also very excited to be making anything they wanted. There were a variety of bees & hives, drone bees, drones, night cat, wrist communicator…

We chatted a little about what they were building and why but the next day they had to describe to the class the importance to the story of what they made.

Eastern Greene Schools had a community fun run on a Saturday at their track.
I set up a variety of activities
Of course there was paper circuits. I also had some necklace trinkets (fairies, gnomes, thunderbird) to make a necklace. PVC pipes for construction. But the most popular was string art.

It was a chilly & damp day, so not as many people came as expected, but I had 2 dozen kids stop and do something and talked with half dozen adults. I got to meet an administrator and a couple of teachers

One of the projects we have been working on is “hands”

The pre-school traced their hands and “signed” them. Our job was to cut it out of wood for an ornament. We took pictures, removed the background using RemoveBG, imported that file into Lightburn and traced it. Often we had to adjust the trace specs to close vectors.

Sometimes we had to edit that vector file because the name touched the outline of the hand. We used edit nodes to break some paths and delete some nodes. It took a little bit  of pre-processing to get them all ready for lasering

We also did an afterschool session of cardboard construction of a “gingerbread house”. They used cardboard cutters, hot glue, craft sticks, straws, pipe cleaners to get some semblance of a gingerbread house. Not everyone got done.

I laser cut some gingerbread people that they could add to their house

Some students at Owen Valley High School formed a group to raise money to help rebuild a bridge at McCormick’s Creek State Park. I had spoken with 1 student and the librarian about sublimation and they asked if they could borrow my equipment in order to sublimate some products to sell at the Christmas on the Square in Spencer. I took my printer and heat presses to them, showed them how  to do it , then left it for a couple of weeks. They used pictures that they had taken and made some tumblers, coffee mugs, canvas totes, cosmetic pouches, garden flags and earrings.

 

I took their logo and laser cut some wood & acrylic… badge size and keychain size

I got a little behind in posting my travels, so the next few posts are out of chronological order.

…

I will get back in order in January.

I got in my sleigh and headed South to Crawford County.

We landed at East Crawford Elementary, in a Fourth Grade classroom.

We got to talk about electricity and find out what ideas or words or people they already knew. They hit upon how we use electricity for almost everything, how it is made (corrected to generated),conductors, insulators, copper,  batteries, positive & negative ends…
Occasionally there are some misconceptions (Edison did NOT invent the light bulb, he came up with a long lasting, easy to produce filament; Ben Franklin did NOT invent electricity, he proved that lightning is electricity).

Then we got to using it with a battery and some LED’s. The challenge was to light up an LED with one battery, then more, then explore various color combinations. After they had some time with that we got down to making paper circuits with out LED, battery and some copper tape