That’s why setting up sites where kids and families can easily come to explore and build their own science and engineering projects is a critical goal of the Community Science Workshop (CSW) Network. Now howtosmile.org is helping the CSW Network set up an online collection of the best hands-on building activities created by CSW students and staff.
“There is a rich collection of CSW activities that we want to put in a centralized database,” says Emilyn Green, CSW Network Coordinator. “Some of the activities are ready to be gathered from different CSW sites and creators, and more will be developed in the future.”
This summer, SMILE catalogers began adding CSW activities to the collection of more than 2,000 STEM activities at howtosmile.org.
Howtosmile.org provides an instantaneous platform to share a catalog of hands-on activities, like those from CSW and other sources. Thanks to the new SMILE “super widget,” learners neighborhood-wide and nationwide can search not only CSW activities but all the high quality, hands-on activities at howtosmile.org— without leaving the CSW Network website.
CSW activities use familiar, easily available, low-cost, and recycled materials like bicycle wheels and cardboard tubes. Students and staff at local CSW sites work together to plan and construct new projects; the online instructions let learners anywhere try their hand at building them too.
“Kids learn critical engineering and thinking skills by building things,” says Green.
They also learn self-confidence. Green has watched newcomers to neighborhood CSW sites start out completely dependent on teachers to direct them in activities, but over time students undergo a dramatic change, as they learn to:
1) have confidence that they can solve a problem
2) break up a problem into component parts
3) deal with things going wrong, including frustration, and remember and review what they did so they can retry
4) take the risk to turn their ideas into new ventures
5) teach others and each other.
With funding from a broad support base, including municipal governments and private foundations, Community Science Workshops partner with local schools, parks and recreation departments, community organizations and diverse groups to provide convenient access to local workshop sites after school, on weekends and during school group visits. Staff also deliver hands-on learning by mobile science vehicles, to students whose remote living locations prevent them from coming to local CSW sites. In addition, CSW staff train at-risk teens to become workshop helpers, mentors and ultimately CSW teachers in the community.
“You cannot overestimate the difficulty for children from communities traditionally underserved in STEM to overcome barriers to education,” says Green. “We must do everything we can to overcome those barriers.”