All of the planning and prepping in the past five weeks of the DukeEngage-Orange County program led up to this past week. The theme of STEM this week at Eureka! was biomedical engineering and we would be presenting and facilitating the lesson plans that we had come up with before even leaving Duke. My partner, Caitlyn, and I created a lesson where the girls could make prosthetics out of household items. We spent time creating a lesson plan, inventing interesting clients that the girls would have to create prosthetics for, and organizing the materials we needed for the lesson to be successful. Fortunately, our lesson was great and it was really amazing to see how our vision of a lesson came to life and how much fun the girls had.
Planning a lesson from the ground up was something that I had never done before and it was a little bit intimidating. I did not really know how timing would work or if the girls would even be interested in what we came up with. However, Caitlyn and I stuck with it and it turned out to be a success even though we had some bumps along the way, like when we were ahead of schedule every day except for the last day and when it was difficult for the girls to understand some of the key concepts we wanted them to leave with. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from the experience and it will help me moving forward as I hope to pursue a career relating to education in some way.