The goal is to empower the students' pursuit of life-long learning and to inspire them to shape and reinvent their world through making, creating and iterating. The students will use their problem solving and critical thinking skills to independently or collaboratively build a variety of projects at multiple levels of difficulty. I want to make learning fun and get the students excited about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)!

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STEM Makerspaces- Marble Run

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School:
Golden Terrace Elementary  
Subject:
Stem 
Teacher:
Tiffany Weeks 
Students Impacted:
450 
Grade:
K-5 
Date:
August 11, 2015

Investor

Thank you to the following investor for funding this grant.

 

License For Learning Plate Fund - $81.94

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Impact to My Classroom

# of Students Impacted: 480

The goal of this grant was to empower the students' pursuit of life-long learning and to inspire them to shape and reinvent their world through making, creating and iterating. The students used their problem solving and critical thinking skills to independently and/or collaboratively build a functional marble run at multiple levels of difficulty. These activities were extremely popular. Students were coming in during recess just to use the materials. I watched students problem solve with other students they didn’t know very well, sometimes the students weren’t even in the same grade! We used the materials during our family STEM event. They were very popular there also. Many parents asked where they could purchase a set to work with as a family at home! This was an unexpected outcome but a very welcomed one! The only adjustment I needed to make to my original sessions was that I had to control the marble. I assigned one marble to each group, and they had to return it at the end of the session. I initially lost many marbles. That ended once I enacted the new procedure.

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Building a run

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Building a run

 

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Even teachers got involved

 

Original Grant Overview

Goal

The goal is to empower the students' pursuit of life-long learning and to inspire them to shape and reinvent their world through making, creating and iterating. The students will use their problem solving and critical thinking skills to independently or collaboratively build a variety of projects at multiple levels of difficulty. I want to make learning fun and get the students excited about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)! 

 

What will be done with my students

Special areas, called Makerspaces, will be set up in the media center. These areas will house a variety of STEM projects. These spaces will allow students to independently or collaboratively create a variety of projects using the supplies and instructions purchased by this grant.
They'll develop their hand-eye coordination and spatial skills while putting their imagination to the test as they use brightly colored chutes, tubes, drop-throughs, merry-go-rounds and spinners to stack and click together to create a custom marble run!
These spaces will be facilitated by the media specialist but will be designed so that students can mostly create and explore independently or with peers.
 

 

Benefits to my students

Learning by doing provides in-depth understanding of concepts with application for real-life scenarios.
Working in pairs or teams, facilitates interactive group problem-solving and teamwork, especially in conjunction with design thinking processes.
These fun projects will get students excited about learning and also build their STEM skills and knowledge. 

 

Budget Narrative

This kit will be able to be reused over and over again. The supplies purchased through this grant will give us unlimited project possibilities when paired with other less expensive materials. 

 

Items

# Item Cost
1 Mega Marble Run $69.95
2 Shipping $11.99
  Total: $81.94

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Special Thanks to Our Presenting Partners

Suncoast Credit Union