In week 3 of the program, we constructed our lesson plans for our asynchronous electives and synchronous stem lesson plans. We only had a few synchronous meetings but for the most part, our work was asynchronous. The extra flexibility was a nice change to the scheduled training of last week. I also enjoyed working with my teammates to plan our lessons together.
For the synchronous stem lesson, Websites for a Cause Day 1, I am working with Scout to teach the campers about advocacy, branding, and HTML website design. I chose this lesson because there are so many local causes and issues that I am passionate about. While teaching the girls about advocacy, I think I can learn a lot as well. In addition, I love it when STEM and advocacy intersect. There is so much potential in the cross over and this lesson will demonstrate to the campers a modern approach to advocacy. In terms of actually creating the lesson, we simply made a slideshow and planned out a presentation. Our Girls inc. leaders gave us a very detailed outline of what we needed to cover so it was quite easy. The most enjoyable part of it was making the slides fun and colorful on Canva.
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The elective lesson was much more difficult. This was mainly because it was asynchronous and we had almost complete freedom over what we covered. I got to work on my elective lesson plan that I pitched in week 1 with Laila.The lesson is called “Make it Soar” and it is centered around projectiles. The campers need to make some kind of device that makes an object fly. This may be a bottle rocket, catapult, or anything else they can think of that fits the criteria.
By design, this project is very flexible. I wanted there to be a hands-on component since a lot of the other work they will be doing is coding-centric and on the computer. However, they can only use spare materials in their house to make their device and materials will vary from household to household. So this project allows them to fit their project around what they have available. Since the turn-in portion is simply a video of their device working and a brief explanation, Laila and I really just needed to construct the facilitation aspect. This is a roughly 30-minute introduction to the topic. We decided to give them an introduction to forces and energy conservation. Kinematics is one of my favorite physics units and projectiles are one of the simplest concepts in kinematics. Just a brief introduction to the basic concepts
would be enough for the campers to understand how their devices work! The hardest part of this lesson is making an asynchronous lesson. To tackle this we made a slide deck that uses Peardeck. This is a google slides add-on that makes your presentation interactive. So even though they are doing this lesson individually they can still answer questions and stay engaged in the lesson. I am looking forward to the notes on our presentations. Next week we have the orientation meetings. I don’t think we are very involved in them, but I am excited nonetheless.