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Idaho SySTEMic Solution enhances student learning
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A new learning experience rushed into Meridian classrooms this year. Its name: Idaho SySTEMic Solution.
In Meridian Elementary School teacher, Luke Franklin’s classroom, energetic children may in fact be accelerating their learning.
Just this year, they have learned how to use Lego bricks to master knowledge of wind energy.
This new solution is described by Franklin as a “way of tying science, technology, engineering, and math into real world situations and applications in the classroom. I really feel like hands-on, inquiry-based lessons are moving education in a positive direction. Innovation is a highly-sought-after quality in a worker, and it is programs like these that are encouraging teachers to educate the future of America with that goal in mind.”
Another example of how these hands-on exercises can be applied is when a teacher asks students to use 945 Lego pieces and keep track of them. The students then use STEM to organize and count the Lego pieces.
Franklin was only one of 38 first- through fifth-grade teachers from seven Meridian elementary schools to participate in an intensive, one-week training at Boise State University last summer.
The SySTEMic Solution initiative is funded by the U.S. Department of Education and was created by Boise State’s Colleges of Engineering and Education. Throughout the 2008-09 school year, teachers in seven area schools taught students how to better engage in math and science by using hands-on lessons.
The brick lab is a SySTEMiC Solutions method that Franklin uses in his classroom. He learned how to implement it from attending a class at BSU. Franklin also attended a week-long math class offered by BSU called MTI.
This is an inquiry-based method of teaching math. Franklin is prepared to use both the brick lab and the MTI class to benefit his students next year.
Franklin finds the joys of this program unlimited, and makes all lessons in STEM a great experience.
“Every lesson has been integrated into the curriculum,” Franklin said. “It makes subjects like math and science real for the students.”
“Our children can excel and become the next generation of innovative scientists and ingenious engineers that the U.S. has always been famous for, and who have contributed so fundamentally to the economic vitality of our nation,” said Janet Callahan, associate dean of the College of Engineering and project leader of Idaho SySTEMic Solution.
DANIELLE REEF
News Journalist
