Mini Maker STEAM Fest Challenges

 Prior to the Christmas Holidays, we launched our Mini Maker STEAM Fest Challenges. This activity marks the first step on the path to STEAM Fest 2022, which will take place later in the school year.

In the end, several students submitted their work for this activity.  We received quite a variety of projects, many of which were developed based on ideas taken from the Science Buddies website, while others were innovations the students designed and developed. themselves. 

At the ABC we very much value student choice,  agency and endeavour so it was fitting that we recognise and highlight the work of the students who not only engaged in various challenges over the past 2 months but also shared their final projects with us. 

On February 11th, each of these students were asked to visit the LRC, where they received a special, quite unexpected prize and a thank you from the organisers for taking part and for sharing their work. They can now choose whether to use their prizes to explore their favourite books or invest in further STEAM challenges at the Libreria Internacional.

Please do visit the STEAM Fest Mini Maker Challenge page for further details on this activity.

Building Empathy

 

Building Empathy

Our 6th-grade students are currently working on an MYP (Middle Years Programme)unit that focuses on three ATLs (Approaches to Learning), one of which is Practicing Collaboration Skills: Practice Empathy. 

The unit sets out to teach this ATL across a wide variety of experiences, one of which was a practical activity done these past two weeks. 

The Statement of Inquiry for the unit is The creative development of innovative products designed to function for an individual's needs, can help lessen inequalities. Through the inquiry process students will be researching designing, developing and testing their 3D solutions for mobility challenges. It can be difficult for students to understand these challenges if they have never experienced them so we set out to give them a few mobility challenges of their own.

This is what two students had to say about that experience.

"This activity made us see how people with disabilities struggle to do things that for us are not complicated but for them are very challenging. It also made us feel disappointed because sometimes we make jokes about those topics when it is a very serious issue. What we did see was how disabled people lived their normal lives. We did this through some “games” which helped us understand what people felt.

We felt very stressed and frustrated because we couldn't do simple things like write our name or even get a cup. We think that we did this activity because it was going to be fun and to reflect on how people with disabilities live their normal lives. This made us feel guilty because we sometimes complain about little things when people with disabilities wish to have legs, arms or other parts of the human body. We hope you reflect on these issues and think about how people live their lives missing a part of their bodies that make their life complicated. 

The question we have to ask you is what would you do if you were them? "

Thanks.

By Gabriel Cañenguez and Adriana Guzmán