Preparing Children and Adolescents for Future STEM Learning

• In Event: FUSE Studios: An Alternative Infrastructure for Learning in Schools

Abstract

As an integrated STEM activity system, FUSE breaks down the silos of traditional STEM disciplines and allows learners to explore STEM concepts within more authentic, interdisciplinary, project-based activities (e.g., NAE & NRC, 2014). FUSE activities also draw on creativity and the arts (turning STEM into STEAM, e.g., Peppler, 2013) and allow learners to engage in personally meaningful experimentation and making (e.g., Dewey, 1897; Papert, 1980; Resnick et al., 2009). For these reasons, FUSE activities have the potential to not only expose learners to STEM concepts, but also to motivate them to engage in future STEM learning and provide them with a toolkit of interdisciplinary skills and practices to use in future STEM learning endeavors.

This paper examines three questions: (1) what interdisciplinary STEM skills are learned in FUSE; (2) how is this learning contingent on specific social and material conditions of the activity system (e.g. Cole, 1996; Hutchins, 1995a; 1995b; Engestrom, 1987); and (3) how might this learning prepare students for success later in life, in STEM learning activities (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999)?

To answer these questions, we followed one classroom of fifth grade students during their participation in both FUSE (45 minutes, twice a week, for one month) and a tetrahedron kite-making activity in their math class (one hour a day for four days). Drawing on cognitive ethnographic methods (Hutchins, 1995a; Hollan et al., 2000), our findings are based on both ethnographic observations of classroom activity and micro-analysis of whole room and point-of-view video, captured by focal students wearing visor cameras.

Our findings suggest that FUSE activities facilitated interdisciplinary STEM skills, such as collaboration, inquiry, digital and representational competencies, and spatial skills, and that learners carried many of these interdisciplinary tools into the kite activity in their math class. Over the course of the four day kite activity, we observed a rapid and participant-driven transition from a math class activity system – characterized by students sitting in their seats, working individually, and asking the teacher for help – to a FUSE activity system – characterized by learners getting up and moving around, helping each other with questions, and engaging in self-directed research and experimentation.

Both teacher and students made explicit connections to FUSE during the activity. For example, on day two, one learner mentioned that making 3D pyramids for his tetrahedron kite was like making pyramids in a CAD program during FUSE. This prompted a discussion of the relative advantages of physical versus computer-based models. On Day Four, as students raced between kite test-flights and an outdoor “maintenance station,” where they iterated on their kite designs, the teacher credited FUSE for how much more self-directed, collaborative, and willing to experiment the students were than in previous years.

These findings demonstrate that FUSE fosters important collaboration, experimentation, and inquiry skills that prepare students for participation in consequent project-based, STEM learning activities. They also suggest connections between specific FUSE activities (e.g. designing with CAD software) and the development of disciplinary (3D geometry) and interdisciplinary (spatial) skills.

Author

• Kay Ellen Ramey, Northwestern University