STEM across the World

The 2nd Edition of David’s and Frank Banks’ popular book Teaching STEM in the Secondary School: Helping Teachers Meet The Challenge, is due to be published early in 2021.

For this edition David asked colleagues from around the world to write about STEM education in their countries. These authors were:

• Australia: David Ellis, Southern Cross University  and P John Williams, Curtin University
• Belgium: Didier Van de Velde, Catholic Education, Flanders
• Brazil: Vitor Mann, Pedagogical Coordinator (Junior High) ORT School
• China: Yang ChunLing, Learn-World.io and
  Ke Shan, Beijing Haidian Teachers Training College
• Israel: Osnat Dagan, Beit Berl College
• Russia: Dr. Sergey Gorinskiy, Autonomous Non-Profit Organization ORT-Russia
• Taiwan: Kuen-Yi Lin  and Yu-Jen Sie, Department of Technology Application and Human Resources Development, National Taiwan Normal University
• USA: John G. Wells, Virginia Tech

The resulting papers were too long for the book so David and Frank extracted a summary from each of the longer papers. However they didn’t want to lose all the valuable material in the full papers, so we are publishing them on this site, for anyone interested in how STEM plays out in these countries to read.

The full papers can be found at STEM across the World.

Revitalising a Sun Jar and the Joule Thief Revisited

Cleaning out a long-neglected cupboard recently I found a Sun Jar that I had forgotten I owned. If you have not come across a Sun Jar before, it is a Mason jar with a circuit inside that charges up when it is light and then lights an LED in the dark; the conceit is that during the hours of daylight it catches a little bit of the Sun and lets it out again in the dark.

Well, this Sun Jar wasn’t capturing light anymore. So, I thought I should have a look and see if I could fix it.

Over on ECT Education, the site for teachers of electronics and physical computing that I run with Paul Gardiner, is a full description of how I restored this Sun Jar and how this relates to the idea of a Joule Thief (a switched-mode power supply).

Revitalising a Sun Jar and the Joule Thief Revisited

Public Interest Technologists

I think it’s broadly accepted, in principle at least, that one element of D&T education should be the development of a critical sensibility in relation to what is designed and made – to, in short, the technological world. The KS3 National curriculum for D&T requires that pupils should be taught to:

understand developments in design and technology, its impact on individuals, society and the environment, and the responsibilities of designers, engineers and technologists

And the GCSE Subject Level Conditions and Requirements for Design and Technology (that all the Awarding Bodies have to base their D&T specification on) require that

…students will need a breadth of technical knowledge and understanding that includes:

• the impact of new and emerging technologies on industry, enterprise, sustainability, people, culture, society and the environment, production techniques and systems
• how the critical evaluation of new and emerging technologies informs design decisions; considering contemporary and potential future scenarios from different perspectives, such as ethics and the environment

In Re-building D&T David and I made two related points. Firstly, that one of the purposes of D&T education is a social one:

In their communities, their workplaces, and through the media, people encounter questions and disputes that have matters of design and/or technology at their core. Often these matters are contentious. Significant understanding of design and of technology is needed to reach an informed view on such matters and engage in discussion and debate.

Secondly, that amongst the Big Ideas of D&T that should underpin curriculum planning in D&T is  the development of “Knowledge of critique regarding impact for justice and for stewardship”.

I’d love to be shouted down as wrong here (please use the comments for this!), but my impression, from an admittedly thin sampling, is that the development of a critical attitude doesn’t have a high priority in D&T schemes of work.

Which brings me to Bruce Schneier. Bruce is a widely acclaimed Security Technologist and author of many books including the really very good Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, a go-to book on Big Data.

Last month Bruce gave a talk at the Royal Society Why technologists need to get involved in public policy?.

I highly recommend the watching of this talk; it’s 15 minutes of your life that I think you’ll find well-spent. Bruce lucidly makes the case that we need what he calls ‘Public Interest Technologists’ and notes that there is both a supply and demand problem with such people at the moment.

This strengthens the case for D&T educators to take seriously their responsibility on the supply side. If we can start to take this strand of D&T education seriously then, as the need for Public Interest Technologists becomes more widely appreciated, it strengthens the case for D&T as an important strand in the education of all future citizens.

One difficulty I think that D&T teachers have with teaching this area is the lack of resources to support it. If you know of good resources and are willing to share the source, I’d be delighted to give them exposure here.

David and I have made a modest start here with our Technological Perspective Readers; there are three readers plus a student guide available at the moment and I intend to add more in the next few weeks. If you have used these with either students or teachers (or student teachers) we’d be really pleased to hear your comments on how the exercise went, how the readers might be improved etc. And if you looked at them and decided they weren’t for you, please tell us why.

If you are interested in reading more about the role of Public Interest Technologists, Bruce maintains a website of Public-Interest Technology Resources.

Comments, as ever, welcome.

With thanks to Boing Boing for the link to Bruce’s RS talk.

Assessment that helps pupils get better!

We know that making assessment both manageable and effective is hard, and we also hear many stories of teachers who have been pushed into carrying out ineffective forms of assessment driven by accountability pressures more than the needs of students and their teachers.

While we believe that abandoning National Curriculum levels was broadly a Good Thing, we also understand that devising replacements hasn’t always been easy and that, in some schools, approaches based on one-size-fits-all-subjects haven’t, in fact, fitted the particular needs of assessment in design & technology especially well.

So we were intrigued to see that the Schools, Students and Teachers network (SSAT), the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) and the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) have produced of a series of Refocusing Assessment documents concerning English, geography, history, mathematics, modern foreign languages and science. The documents considered four key questions:

• What does it mean to be successful in a particular subject?
• What is the purpose of assessment in that subject?
• What does progress look like in that subject?
• How can progress be assessed most effectively in that subject?

We (David, Nick and Torben) were impressed with these documents and thought it would be useful to have one focused on the needs of design & technology; so, we have produced Refocusing Assessment – Design & Technology in which we explore the answers to these questions for our subject.
We are delighted that ASCL, SSAT, and NfER will be putting a link to these materials on their websites.

Writing the Refocusing document got us thinking in some detail about the process of assessment in design & technology, particularly assessment for learning in which feedback to students is of paramount importance. This led us to write the working paper Assessment in D&T, in which we consider three aspects of assessment:

• ‘in the moment’ feedback which takes place during learning,
• approaches to feedback at the end of design & technology tasks and
• how teachers might be able to know the impact of their teaching.

With the demise of levels, it is more important than ever that teachers are clear about what they want their pupils to learn, how to help pupils to achieve this learning and what success in that learning looks like. We hope that the approaches to assessment we have written about will help with these endeavours.

As a postscript we note that a just published report from Pearson, Testing the Water; How assessment can underpin, not undermine, great teaching, confirms the importance of teachers being able to understand and use assessment in ways that aren’t onerous or stressful for themselves or their pupils. We hope that the work we present here will go some way to supporting D&T teachers in such use of assessment.

If you think our proposals are realistic and are able to try them out in your school, we’d really like to know about your experience.

If you think what we are advocating can be improved on, and have suggestions for this, we’d like to know about that too.

You can give us your views and tell us about your work by contacting us or commenting on this post.

Build, Use, Damage, Mend and Adapt – an approach to learning through and about drones

A guest post by Ed Charlwood

What follows describes the work I’ve been doing in school that has led to me to set up a new Drones in Schools Google+ community for teachers.

A convergence of influences

As with much curriculum development, serendipity did its job at the outset of this endeavour, bringing together the opportunities offered by (1) the new GCSE and A Level specifications and their broader content requirements, (2) a growing dissatisfaction with a certain high-profile external “design / engineering” competition that really requires very little design and (3) the discovery of a very interesting little kit. Firstly, the long-awaited publication of the new GCSE and A Level specifications really was a wake up call that we could not continue to plough the same RM / Product Design furrow at either qualification level. I felt it important to embrace the specification in its entirety and that meant that at Latymer we would have to teach areas that were less familiar i.e. Systems and Control and Textiles. It also meant that we could fully embrace previously fringe areas that we had been pushing at for a few years but had been confined by old assessment criteria, namely the use of CAD, CAM and the circular economy. Secondly, I have seen our students be equally engaged and frustrated with external engineering competitions, they promised a glimpse into the competitive world of high level engineering but actually offered little real decision making, restrictive and difficult manufacturing processes and actually required a lot of luck and frivolous administration. I won’t name names. Lastly I came across a $99 / £78 kit from Flexbot, offering a 3D printable drone and the promise of an open source kit. A quick PayPal purchase later and I was the proud owner of a Flexbot Quadcopter (4 rotors), cleverly packaged, with a comprehensive and appropriate information booklet and a product that worked pretty much straight out for the box and could fly via an iPhone app. Bingo.

Drones are a great ‘hook’ for learning

Drones are popular in the media, comprehensible to most people and on a steep curve of becoming demonstrably better and cheaper at the same time. Currently they have the elusive “engagement factor” and this provides a ‘hook’ making them intrinsically attractive to students. Such a hook is, in my experience, vital. It is important to note that we are not coding experts, nor are we overly interested in programming. But we are interested in using electronics to do stuff. And it is here that the Flexbot Quadcopter meets our teaching intentions.

Our approach

Under the guidance of my colleague Nick Creak we handed the kit over to our students. They assembled the drone without difficulty. Then they had a play, crashed it and naturally broke it. They took the kit apart and made some key measurements, download CAD files from the Flexbot Wiki (SketchUp) and Thingiverse (.stl) and printed a replacement for the part for the one they broke. They then began to explore the files and started to design their own drone. Initially they did this by pretty much by simplifying and copying the existing design, a useful process in its own right to develop CAD techniques and collaborative skills.

A 3D printed Flexbot part

We then printed their chassis designs and used the slicing software to investigate various manufacturing options:

• How long would the print take if it was “ultimate” or “low” quality?
• What would happen if it had a low / medium / dense fill?
• What were the implications of the design being aligned differently?

On average a “normal quality” high density print would take 2 hours. The booklet provided by Flexbot also has some interesting text comparing the economics of 3D printed manufacturing vs mass production techniques like injection moulding.

Students then could begin to design “iteratively” – a new key concept in the OCR interpretation of the new specifications.

“Iterative design is a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analysing, and refining a product or process. Based on the results of testing the most recent iteration of a design, changes and refinements are made.”

We also offered a number of design challenges: design a modular drone, alter your design to use as little filament as possible (make it cheap!) or to print as quickly as possible, design your drone to use a standard component – in our case this was a Lego axle.

Flexbot parts

The Flexbot circuit is robust enough to be shared between students and the batteries, propellers and motors are cheap enough to buy in bulk. If you do not have a 3D printer, jobs can be specified, costed and outsourced to a 3D print hub. The simulator (which is available once you have started the process of uploading parts for hub to print) shows it would cost approximately £6 for a basic chassis made from PLA by Fused Deposition Modelling. Some hubs even offer 25% student discount and most do almost next day delivery.

We additionally posed a number of extensions questions to our students, each eliciting a different design outcome: What is the effect of changing the alignment of the rotors? How big/small can the drone be? How much weight can it pick up?

Reflections

Design Decisions Pentagon

David Barlex has produced a design decision pentagon to describe the decisions that students might make when they are designing and making. So I was intrigued to use this to explore the decisions that our students were making.

Clearly they weren’t making any big conceptual decisions – the sort of product had already been decided – a quadcopter drone. The technical decisions in terms of how it would work had also been decided – four electric motors linked to flexbot circuit, controlled by the Bingo app. But there were lots of possibilities in the constructional decision-making.

Not 90°!

One student changed the alignment of the motors so that they were no longer at 90^o to one another which made the drone faster but harder to control. And I suppose you could argue that this constructional change did in fact change the way the drone worked. A key feature of the pentagon is that the design decisions featured at each of the vertices aren’t independent of one another hence the lines between the vertices.

Interference fit

Another student responded to the modular challenge producing a design with four separate arms held tightly by an interference fit to the central node, taking advantage of the high degree of dimensional accuracy of additive manufacture. This required investigation and was in itself was a valuable learning experience.

Clearly it’s possible to set particular design challenges around constructional decisions e.g. making it more crash worthy.

Aesthetic decisions could also be made. Indeed changing the alignment of the motors could be seen as an aesthetic as well as a constructional decision. Devising light-weight covers that can be 3D printed or perhaps produced from nets that have been laser cut from thin sheet plastic might give the drone different ‘personalities’ and this may be seen as a marketing decision, changing the appearance to have appeal to different users. Marketing decisions can also be made with regard to how the drone gets to market – via a kit in a shop or on line, or via digital files for home or hub manufacture in collaboration with a circuit board/electrical motor supplier, related to this, deciding whether the product is open source or not is also a marketing decision. And just who the drone is for will make a big difference to what it might look like and additional features. And taking a step back how will the design decisions overall be affected by requiring drones to be part of a circular economy?

There is, of course, a “purer” engineering challenge, to design and make racing drones, where there are already a number of competitions with related rules and constraints.

The next area for us to consider is that of the consequences of drone technology, and its close cousin the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) many of which have some more sinister applications; bombing, surveillance and smuggling as a counterbalance to the positive aspects; photography, delivery, surveying etc… each is a rich seam for discussion as well as the wider issues of automation, disruptive technologies generally or government regulation and control.

Far from this being a proprietary endeavour I want this to be a collaborative, open source one, so I invite you to join the Drones in Schools Google+ community to share your experiences, ideas and resources or add your comments to this post.

Ed Charlwood

Head of Design & Director of Digital Learning at Latymer Upper School, London

I am a passionate advocate of Design education who believes in the power of learning through analysis, designing and making. I am an Apple Distinguished Educator (class of 2013), a Google Certified Teacher (class of 2015) and the DATA Outstanding Newcomer to Design and Technology Award winner (2008), a particular focus of my work is to exemplify the notion that innovative and appropriate use of technology can redefine the traditional teacher-learner relationship and transform educational designing and making experiences. My vision is to inspire and empower students to make the things they imagine.

The Disruptive Technologies and D&T newsletter #2

This is the last time I’ll clog up this blog with stuff about the Disruptive Technologies and D&T newsletter. But just to show it wasn’t a total flash-in-the-pan, the second edition has just been posted

You can sign up for the newsletter and read past issues from the newsletter archive.

 

The Disruptive Technologies and D&T newsletter

[Update 15-15-17: the first newsletter has been posted. If you haven’t already signed up for it, you can view it (and choose to subscribe) here.]

Early next week I’ll be launching a newsletter focussed on Disruptive Technologies and D&T. What I want to do here is explain a little bit why I’m starting this and the kind of content that it will contain.

The first edition of the newsletter will be published next week – some of what follows is sampled from it.

You can sign up for the newsletter on the newsletter’s sign up page.

Background

David Barlex and I have been working on a project that focuses on making a range of Disruptive Technologies (DTs) accessible for classroom use and discussion. The DTs we have chosen to emphasise are:

• Additive manufacturing
• Artificial intelligence
• Augmented reality
• Big data
• Internet of things
• Neurotechnology
• Programmable matter
• Robotics
• Synthetic biology

We think these technologies provide a really powerful context to help pupils learn about technological perspective (this idea is developed in our recent Working Paper Big Ideas for D&T), while at the same time introducing pupils to technologies that  are likely to have a significant impact on their adult lives. The DTs we have chosen are at very different levels of development with, for example, additive manufacturing being something that many (most? all?) schools have at least some access to. In contrast, synthetic biology is advancing surprisingly rapidly as a technology in industry but has, so far, made minimal impact in schools and programmable matter remains largely a R&D project in some universities and other research institutes.

We also realise that there are other technologies ‘out there’ that have the potential to be disruptive and, also, that it is possible that some of our nominated DTs may turn out to be more of a disruptive whimper than a bang. That’s future-gazing for you.

This is an ‘in our free time’ project so inevitably develops more slowly than we would like.

However, I read a lot. (Well, David and I both read a lot – but I should probably emphasise that I take responsibility for what appears in this newsletter.) And I’d like to share the fruits of this reading with colleagues in D&T because I realise that not all have the luxury of time that I do to wade through quite a lot of content to find the useful and interesting nuggets.

This is probably my age talking, but Twitter seems to me to be too ephemeral for stuff that might actually be useful (if you’re lucky enough to see it fly by you probably won’t find it again when you need it…). And I don’t want to clog up the blog on our website with this kind of stuff. So, I’m trying out a newsletter for size; it will take at least six months for me to decide whether it is a success or not – and I’ll measure that by how many folk have signed up to it.

Content

I’ve deliberately called this ‘The Disruptive technologies and D&T’ newsletter rather than ‘The Disruptive technologies in D&T’ newsletter as this gives me a bit of elbow room to wander over wider issues related to D&T education. Mostly it will contain links to recently published material on-line with a degree of commentary on each item. I’ll make no attempt to cover every DT every time. And I’ll also mentions books that I’ve read that seem to me to be useful, relevant or interesting. Sometimes they’ll be all three.

My aim is to produce a reasonably (but not too) frequent edition with enough content to be interesting but not overwhelming. I’m thinking that perhaps 3-4 issues a month, during term-time, might be about right, with a slower rate of publication in school holidays. I will rely on feedback from you to tell me whether both the frequency and length are reasonably manageable.

If you think that such a newsletter might be useful, please both sign up to receive it and forward this post on to colleagues and, if you work in ITE in any capacity, to your trainee teachers.

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Click to subscribe to the Disruptive Technologies and D&T Newsletter

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Re-Building D&T v2

Re-Building Design & Technology v2 is now available here. It has been informed by the responses we have had to the first version. We have taken many of these responses into account in rewriting the original eight sections and have introduced a completely new section Re-building – necessary but not sufficient.

Prior to publishing v2 of this document we sought the support of the D&T Association. To this end, we had a very productive meeting with Julie Nugent, the new CEO of the D&T Association and Andy Mitchell, the deputy CEO, at which they welcomed v2 of the Re-building paper and looked forward to working with stakeholders in responding to the recommendations. However we want to reiterate here what the paper says:

Our recommendations all carry implied costs, in some cases relatively modest and in others significant. These costs are beyond the current budget of the Association and it is really important that the whole D&T community works with the Association to help the realisation of these recommendations with both practical and financial support.

If you would like to discuss the provision of either practical or financial support with the D&T Association, you can contact them via their website; we suggest that you mention the Re-Building D&T document and it may be helpful to note that your message is for the attention of Julie Nugent, CEO.

In addition we look forward to receiving any comments you have on v2 and would welcome indications of how you might be using v2 of the document in your school, your initial teacher training or in the provision of CPD.

As ever, you can comment on this post or contact us directly.

Re-Building D&T

Our subject is in the doldrums. The KS3 Programme of Study introduced in 2013, coupled with the new GCSE, offers the possibility of modernisation but the challenges to the subject are much more deep-rooted.

We have identified four core challenges:

• A lack of agreed epistemology
• Confusion about purpose
• Uncertainty about the nature of good practice
• Erroneous stakeholder perceptions

These have contributed over several decades to a situation where less than 30% of young people now study the subject to 16+.

What can be done to restore design & technology to the grand intentions of the 1989 Parkes Report that heralded its introduction into the National Curriculum?

That’s what this post is all about. David and Torben, working with Nick Givens, have written a paper, Re-building Design & Technology, that explores these four challenges and how they might be tackled.

The paper contains 12 recommendations for the Design & Technology Association to consider, that we believe build on its existing aims and activities.

The emphasis in these recommendations is on the leadership role of the Association; we are not suggesting in any way that the Association can undertake the role of re-building design & technology alone.

All members of the community of practice along with those who support the subject of design & technology and those in positions of influence over the subject need to understand the key roles of Epistemology, Clarity of purpose, Good practice and Informed stakeholder perception in re-building design & technology as a key part of the school curriculum. All need to work with and in support of the Association in this endeavour.

As always we hope this post will stimulate discussion and we look forward to your comments.

Various versions of the paper, including a print-friendly one (with the large blocks of colour removed) and a version as web pages can be found through our Re-Building D&T page.

Humble Bundle deal on Make: titles

Humble Bundle is currently offering a wide range of books from the Make: catalogue. At the moment over $300 worth of books is on offer.

The offer expires in 7 days.

The deal is you pay what you want, over a very low limit, some of the money goes to charity, some to Make: and some to Humble Bundle; you can choose these ratios.

What you get is DRM-free e-versions of the books in pdf, epub (Apple iBook) and mobi (Amazon Kindle) versions.

There is a number of (IMHO…) highly recommendable books in the offer. What more can I say?