Kindergartners Build EcoSonic Playground

Ever since 1999, Lower School music teacher Sara Zur had been dreaming of creating a musical play space for kids that would open their imaginations and foster a love of music. During travels in England and Israel, Zur had witnessed sound installations and melodic play areas, including a junkyard in Israel that transformed everyday waste objects into a learning opportunities for children.

“There was something about playing with everyday objects that seemed to make kids be extra musical,” Zur says. “There is a collaborative element, and a stretching of the imagination that can’t be duplicated with regular instruments.”

Made from recycled materials, an EcoSonic playground is essentially a large, unique, music-making structure intended to promote collaborative play. Building one includes a curriculum component for elementary schools to teach students STEM skills through lessons in acoustics, physics, engineering, and design as they work with educators to build the structures themselves.

Zur, who holds a doctorate in musical play, quickly contacted her colleague Elissa Johnson-Green, a music professor at Umass Lowell, who heads up an EcoSonic team comprised of professors and graduate students. Over the course of the year, the EcoSonic team and Zur met regularly with the kindergartners to design and implement the play space. This didn’t just involve the nuts and bolts of putting the playground together.

The students studied sound vibrations in Carol Fine’s science class, and tested different materials with Lower School technology integration and makerspace mentor Mickey Hardt. They drew up designs in their homeroom, and, of course, they studied music proper with Zur.

Finally, this spring, the project came together when the musical playground was unveiled during the last week of school. PVC pipes, an old vacuum cleaner hose, a bike tire, and countless other everyday objects had been pulled together to create BB&N’s EcoSonic playground.

“There is this drumming thing, and there is a tube that you can listen to like a headphone, and you can hear everything, except the sound is smaller,” explains kindergartener Ryan McCullough excitedly. “But designing it was even more fun than playing it, because when you are designing it, you get to play with more people.”

The final result has been an EcoSonic playground that sounds at turns beautiful, cacophonous, and vibrant—but above all else, fun!

US STEM fair

Girls in Dr. Gatti's GAINS club put together a STEM fair for Upper School with many student exhibits. One exhibit used the school's VR system to let students experience VR apps like Google Earth and Tilt Brush.

US girls interested in engineering can visit MIT!

MIT’s Women in Aerospace is hosting an event on October 15th for high school girls interested in aerospace to come tour some labs at MIT, hear from a professor, and hear about what it's like to be an engineering student. It is a repeat of the event we did last year, but with different labs, lecture topics, and a different Professor speaking, so that people can repeat if they wish. There will also be lunch provided and a quick lesson on a fun topic in aerospace (basic rocket stability or simple airfoil principles or something along those lines). It should be a really fun day and a good way to get an idea of what opportunities there are in the aerospace field!
If you could please share this event with students you think would be interested, we would really appreciate it! If you have time to send it along to other teachers you know in the area also that would be awesome.

To register for the event, students should fill out this google form:
https://goo.gl/forms/rxcn14vFcHD9XOO02

The deadline for students to register is Oct 8th.

Summer STEM Opportunities for Upper School Girls

CODEBREAKERS

Boston University is pleased to host CODEBREAKERS, a four-week summer program providing an introduction to the fundamentals of cyber security, a field that combines the studies of computer science, forensics, law, and computer programming to protect networks, computers, programs, and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access.

Students will participate in a four-week session of lectures, hands-on training, and day trips to technology companies to receive an immersive and supportive introduction to the interdisciplinary field of cyber security. CODEBREAKERS provides a unique opportunity for high school students to be introduced to career opportunities in the exciting field of cyber security, as well as to be mentored by women who are program coordinators or invited guest speakers.

The program will run from July 10th through August 4th Monday-Friday from 9:00-3:00 pm. Young women currently in 9th or 10th grade who live within daily commuting distance to Boston are eligible to apply. Students do not need any background or experience in cyber security or computer programming is needed in order to apply, only their interest and enthusiasm.

For more information and to apply: go to: www.bu.edu/lernet/cyber


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SUMMER PATHWAYS

BU is pleased to host the Summer Pathways program July 7-14, 2017. In its eleventh year, Summer Pathways is an exciting seven-day, residential program for high school girls entering their junior or senior year in September 2017. The program targets girls from Boston area high schools who show promise and/or interest in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). Tuition is $675 and includes room, board, all travel and activities, and an overnight at Thompson Island in Boston Harbor. Scholarships of up to $575 are available to students with demonstrated financial need.

Over the course of the week, participants in Summer Pathways have the opportunity to gain first hand knowledge of a wide range of careers in STEM disciplines, and also to interact with successful women at all levels of science and engineering -- undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and members of industry.

Participants live in a BU dormitory along with their peers, and during this week, engage in many hands-on science activities, visit laboratories and a local industry, hear from a career panel, and learn about the college admissions process. On Thompson Island, they will develop communication skills and experience a process of self-discovery through team building exercises.


For more information about the program and to apply, go to: www.bu.edu/lernet/spathways

Student Ingenuity on Display at Upper School STEM Fair

When Lily Druker '18 and Ali Plump '18 assumed leadership roles in the Upper School GAINS club (Girls Advancing in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) they knew they would be overseeing a fascinating variety of innovative ideas. Impressed with the energy and commitment they witnessed, the two decided that the entire school needed to get involved.

"We just wanted to come up a fun way to share all of these great student ideas with the community, but we didn't want to make it a stressful thing," says Plump. "So we came up with an optional fair that anyone could get involved with and bring their projects or ideas to the table."

The result? Nearly 40 students volunteered to present. And on a Friday afternoon in later winter the Upper School community room was packed with students and faculty alike, eagerly checking out the myriad concepts on display.

Among the many exhibitions were homemade Van der Graaf generators (capable of creating a visible electrical charge), cathode ray tubes, models of energy efficient smart homes, space telescopes, chemically altered "healthy" caramel, software designed to cater course curriculums to specific student learning styles, and many more interesting projects.

Click here for a gallery of images from the STEM fair.

LS AfterSchool Engineering Class

One of the new offerings in the AfterSchool Programs this year is a "STEAM Team" class taking place Tuesday afternoons in our new maker-space. This after school class is exploring a variety of engineering challenges and principles. "STEAM" classes give students experience with challenges that integrate disciplines of Science, Tech, Engineering, Art, & Math. To date, students have explored expanding spheres, and strategies of building and launching a hand-held catapult.

An upcoming unit will focus on robotic bugs constructed with vibration motors and button batteries.

US Advancing Girls in STEM

This year, thanks to Dr. Long, BB&N's upper school has joined the GAINS network as a member school. GAINS is Girls Advancing In STEM, whose mission is to promote the inclusion of young women in STEM fields, including Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math, (which also incldues computer science, astronomy, robotics, health and medicine etc.) This provides young women at BB&N the opportunity to become part of this nationwide network and participate in their online platform, connecting us with other students as well as female mentors who have chosen to pursue STEM careers. At BB&N, this will be a new club/interest group that will meet every other week during Tuesday X block. 

At our meetings, we will get together, discuss topics related to STEM careers and host guest speakers, visit outside labs and develop a project of our own that we will do. Dr. Long will be recruiting both alumni and local mentors to join the network on behalf of BB&N and help students make connections with them for advice and the chance to get to know someone who has chosen a career in a STEM field. Contact Dr. Long for more info!

Here is a video from the GAINS website:

BB&N Teachers attend STEM forum at Harvard

Last Wednesday, February 18, a few BB&N educators were able to attend the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Askwith Forum "A Space of Their Own?  Girls, Women, and STEM."  In attendance were Lower School Academic Technology Specialist RM Pellant and Upper School math teachers Mark Fidler, Chip Rollinson, and Mike Bernstein.  HGSE advertised the event as follows, "Girls and women are significantly underrepresented in many areas of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and STEM professions. In this group conversation, we will discuss what factors contribute to female underrepresentation in STEM, why female underrepresentation is problematic, and how to support broader participation."  The event was moderated by Karen Brennan, Assistant Professor of Education, HGSE, and the panelists were:

• Kimberly Bryant, Founder, Black Girls CODE
• Maria Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College
• Jane Margolis, Ed.M.'88, Ed.D.'90, Senior Researcher, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
• Stephanie Wilson, Astronaut, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

At the Askwith Forum, panelists discussed what factors contribute to female underrepresentation in STEM.  Watch their discussion here.

Below are some of the takeaways from Mark Fidler:

"A major focus of the "Girls and STEM" panel discussion at the Harvard Ed School was on girls and computer programming. Discussion touched upon the impediments to girls entering the field at all levels - elementary school, middle school, high school. college, and in industry. There was discussion of racial and economic factors, too. Mike Bernstein, Chip Rollinson, and I attended. Mike and I felt that the most important suggestion for us was to make introductory programming experiences fun, not scary, and social. This week, the EPC approved an Upper School programming course designed to be all three of those. At BB&N, we have a much higher female percentage of AP Comp Sci students than at most schools. Mike and I are committed to improving that with our goal being 50%."

Lastly, below are a couple of related resources shared by Chip Rollinson:

• http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/20/jerry-lawson-game-pioneer/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/upshot/how-elementary-school-teachers-biases-can-discourage-girls-from-math-and-science.html?ref=topics&_r=0

A few more resources related to the event:

Harvard Gazette: Code Like a Girl

Black Girls Code

Black Girls Code Founder Kimberly Bryant on Inspiring Students to Pursue STEM

Tech Spotlight: Kimberly Bryant, Founder of Black Girls Code

-Megan

8th Grade Science Journal

The BB&N 8th grade class of 2014 designed and conducted field studies at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, MA. The Knight Science Web Journal is a compilation of all of those reports. Here is a link to see it: http://tinyurl.com/KnightScience2014

Tufts CEEO STEM Lecture series

After school on Monday, April 22nd, we attended the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach STEM Education lecture series talk given by Jim Slotta from the University of Toronto.  His talk presented "a recent theoretical model of collective inquiry called Knowledge Community and Inquiry, developed by Jim Slotta to guide the designs of complex collaborative inquiry curriculum for secondary science. Typical KCI designs are several months in duration, with students engaged in developing a shared knowledge base that serves as a resource for carefully scripted inquiry projects. In the past several years, Slotta and his team have advanced a sophisticated technology architecture called SAIL (Scalable Architecture for Interactive Learning) to provide scaffolding and real time analytic support for the sequencing of interactions amongst people, materials, tools and activities."  His talk explained KCI and SAIL, as well as a framework for smart classroom research called SAIL Smart Space.  He then presented three curriculum designs from current research projects.  One thing we connected with was the 5th and 6th grade science unit on life cycles using wallcology.

-Megan Haddadi and Jen Lavenberg