63. What is the Point of a Field Trip?
What is the point of a field trip? In this episode, Natasha brings Claire on another adventure with a group of undergraduate engineering students who plan to become STEM teachers. Learn how educators can thoughtfully plan a field trip experience to maximize learning and when may be the optimal time for these types of experiences within a unit of study.
62. Life on Another Planet? Career Chat with an Astrobiologist!
Does life exist on another planet? Listen to a fascinating STEM career chat with Dr. Charity Lander-Phillips, an astrobiologist at Southwest Research Institute. We discuss how her love for volcanoes as a kid led to her current work searching for life on another planet. Tune in for this exciting episode, taken from a recent Space Club Career Chat. All questions were submitted by elementary and middle school students who wanted to know more about her exciting STEM career, how she got here, and what sort of challenges she faces!
61. Crazy Chemistry and Your Questions Answered
What are your must-haves for a STEM lab? What is a quick STEM challenge for a school showcase? How can I turn a theatrical puppet into an engineering design challenge? In this episode, Natasha and Claire answer your questions submitted in The STEM Space Facebook group! Plus, we share a wild story of a school being evacuated due to a science experiment gone awry.
60. Why Should You Have More Than One Solution?
“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one we have.”
- Émile-Auguste Chartier, French philosopher
After many class discussions of failure, social-emotional learning (SEL), and upstairs/downstairs brain, one of Claire’s 6th grade students asked, “Why do you think that [failure is] required? If you’re successful the first time, why isn’t that a victory? Why is failure necessary? Why do you HAVE to fail?” Taking this personally as an engineer, Claire mulled this over and found the quote above as she began examining how to better explain this to her students. Tune in as Natasha details her most recent NSTA Conference venture (and how teachers fared compared to the engineering class in a prior episode) and Claire tells the truth about why you need more than one idea.
59. How to Motivate Students and Regulate Emotions in STEM
Rewards work well if you have a skill or a task that is mechanical, but what about in STEM? How do you get your students to be more intrinsically motivated versus wanting those extrinsic rewards? Tune in as Claire recaps her Invention Convention with Natasha and all of the ways she was surprised by her students. Learn how you can incorporate motivational tools and emotion regulation methods into your STEM class.
58. Are You Training Up Innovators?
You can come up with anything you want. There are no constraints. It sounds like the perfect formula… for disaster. It’s been proven time and time again that we, and especially our students, need constraints. But how do you give them constraints without stifling their creativity? Enter Invention Convention! Tune in as Natasha questions Claire on her school’s very first Invention Convention and other important facets of this amazing corner of STEM (like wondering if we need/will get a Starbucks on the moon?), the difference between invention and innovation, and how you can use these concepts to inspire your students.