DMCC

How can we help young people expand their approach to solving problems in their community? How might community engagement practices benefit from a human centered design process? Join us to discuss the natural and meaningful connection between the design thinking process and civic engagement. Using examples of student projects from the course Senior Capstone: Civic Engagement and Social Innovation at Windward School, we will explore how pressing social issues in our community can be better understood through interviewing, brainstorming, iteration, prototyping and feedback.

Both Mirman's Director of Technology and 7th grade science teacher are data nerds. While looking for a way to integrated computational data analysis with the life science curriculum, we happened upon the idea of using Jupyter Notebooks to guide the inquiry and teaching of these tools. Jupyter allows text/images to coexist with executable code, resulting in a "literate program" that reasons its way through the code. In this case, students reasoned their way toward using the Lotka-Volterra model to simulate how predator and prey populations in a given ecosystem correlate.

In this interactive session, we will design and build functional lamps. We’ll start with a brief presentation of student work and a demonstration on light and socket wiring. Participants will then design and build a lamp using a variety of materials and be able to take their creations home at the end of the session.

How can we leverage the use of coding/robotics to enhance the student learning experience in any discipline? How do we teach coding to a differentiated group? Based on a project completed in the 8th grade science classes at Windward, in which students designed interactive museum exhibits on various Earth Science concepts, this workshop will walk its participants through the experience of introducing coding and robotics for the purpose of completing a content-focused project. Participants will get a chance to design and build their own Hummingbird project based on a content-specific concept of their choice.

Come to a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn about wearable technologies. The presenter will first describe her experience launching a new arts elective class to middle-schoolers, “Sewing with Circuits,” then will give attendees a chance to sew their own simple circuit.

Come explore the Sphero SPRK+ Robot as an interdisciplinary tool for introducing design, coding and data collection into your STEM curriculum. In this hands-on workshop, you will design, build and code a Roman chariot (that’s humanities!) for your Sphero and then analyze the data collect to develop an understanding of science concepts such as kinematics, Newton’s Laws and rotation. You will leave with a collection of coding activities that work across disciplines and across grade levels.

We will be making simple crankshaft based toys from readily sourced materials. Using common household items like: tin cans, coat hangers, cardboard boxes and plastic bottles we will make clever machines. Covering the basics of using small tools for forming wire, drilling holes and creating simple crankshafts for our kinetic contraptions. In this fun workshop we will also talk about additional applications for STEAM integration.