My goal with this post is to add some clarity to the array of STEM tools and resources online. Specifically, long-term stem projects may be underrepresented, underutilized, and within your reach! Read on for some of the elements and benefits of long-term STEM projects.
What is STEM?
STEM refers to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. STEM education takes place at every grade level and can tend to focus on math and science. Learning with STEM offers students rich hands-on experiences in authentic, real-world scenarios. Long-term STEM Projects require a fuller commitment by teachers and students and provide in-depth learning opportunities.
There are fantastic STEM ideas, activities, challenges, and projects online. Many of these resources facilitate inquiry-based learning, offer high engagement, and spark interest. Many are also free! Nearly all STEM lessons are project-based, and many follow a design process or cycle.
STEM challenges work great for short, very highly engaging hands-on experiences. STEM projects may require some planning and time to reach completion.
What is Considered a Long Term Project?
Projects that require substantial research or planning could be considered long-term projects. For example, if students were to make a web page of their best artwork, planning would be needed to determine the artifacts to showcase, the user navigation flow, and the layout of the web pages.
Long-term projects also require some research on the front end to get going. A teacher might create a stock market game for her students in a business class. The class must first research companies before investing. An upcycling project might require a study of the types of plastics to target to remove from the waste stream.
In STEM, long-term projects can be science focused. For example, growing sugar crystals or investigating how salt affects plant growth requires substantial time. These long-term projects involve a bit of set-and-forget and gathering data along the way.
Characteristics of Long Term STEM Projects
Long-term STEM projects share many characteristics of STEM challenges, activities, and projects. However, with a deeper commitment, more time is needed to engage students with all that STEM can offer. More time means teachers can cultivate a richer learning experience for their students. Consider the following when planning a long-term STEM project for your students!
Make it STEAM
More time means more opportunities to offer STEAM learning. STEAM includes STEM learning with a coherent and meaningful art-integrated experience. STEAM, like STEM, is essential to develop 21st-century skills such as creativity and critical thinking. For engineering-related projects, I like to have students create 2D and 3D pencil sketches of their best idea for the solution to a problem.
Craft a Driving Question
What are driving questions? Driving questions dig into real-world issues, are open-ended and complex, and relate concepts across disciplines. The driving question for a long-term STEM project can spark profound connections between science, technology, engineering, and math. Statements of inquiry and essential questions also power sustained inquiry and learning in long-term STEM projects.
Teachers can author driving questions based on subject-area standards and real-world connections. Driving questions can come about organically from your students’ interests in the world around them. For example, if students become curious about how waste is managed at your school, use an upcycling lesson with the following driving question: How should systems be sustainable to minimize harmful human impact on the environment?
Use Interdisciplinary Opportunities with PBL
Is it even possible to teach STEM without incorporating aspects of project-based learning (PBL)? What about problem-based learning? John Larmer describes problem-based learning as falling into the category of problem-based learning. Both types of learning can be called “PBL”!
STEM learning is a natural fit with hands-on problem-solving projects. Interdisciplinary learning leverages reading, writing, math, and 21st-century skills to make student learning relevant while getting to the best idea to create the solution.
Differentiate Team Roles
Teamwork and collaboration fit well with STEM challenges, activities, and projects. Long-term STEM projects promote collaborative teamwork and offer students a variety of team roles. The steps in a design process or cycle also open up opportunities to vary team roles to suit the needs of the task based on a student’s interests and strengths.
Connect to Stories and Culture
STEM combined with stories can help add authenticity to the lesson, especially for younger students. For example, the familiar tale of the Three Little Pigs can be creatively adapted to create an engineering tradeoff design problem. The GRASPS model can synthesize the essentials of a story for a STEM PBL learning unit.
Follow the Design Process
I’ve mentioned the design process a few times already. What is the design process, and how is it used? The design process (sometimes referred to as the engineering design process or engineering design cycle) is a sequence of logical steps to solve a problem.
Generally, the design process can range from four to twelve steps. The process is sometimes called a cycle because the last step, which is an evaluation of the design’s success, can inform the research, which is the first step of the cycle. The general steps of the design process are:
Explore each phase or step in the process in smaller substeps. By breaking each step into smaller parts or substeps, you can create a multi-week, in-depth, long-term STEM project with abundant opportunities for interdisciplinary learning.
A. Analyze a Need
- A.1. Ask and Empathize – Explore the who, what, and why of the problem
- A.2. Investigate and Research the Problem
- A.3. Define the Problem
B. Develop Ideas
- B.1. Brainstorm
- B.2. Specify Requirements
- B.3. Represent the Best Idea
C. Create a Prototype
- C.1. Plan the Building Steps
- C.2. Create the Prototype
- C.3. Justify Plan Changes
D. Test and Evaluate
- D.1. Test the Prototype
- D.2. Evaluate the Results
- D.3. Reflect on the Results
Leverage Formative Assessment
STEM challenges can, of course, be fun. Really fun! They can also be abrupt and short. Certainly, some discussion happens when the challenge concludes. For example, after a STEM challenge that’s a contest, the teacher would determine and declare a winner. The shorter the STEM activity, the less opportunity for formative assessment.
Why use formative assessment? Formative feedback facilitates a low-risk, high-impact way to communicate with students about their performance. Specific and meaningful feedback can add authenticity to the project’s purpose. Formative assessment will uncover misconceptions, improve how you teach STEM, and show that you, the teacher, care about your students learning.
Try to give a formative assessment at each step of the design process according to a rubric that provides precise feedback on the desired task (e.g., developing ideas). Feedback via analytic or development rubrics also provides diagnostic information for the teacher to adjust instruction accordingly.
Relate Writing to STEM
Why is writing important in STEM? Communication is essential in all subject areas and professional fields. Writing is a natural fit with long-term projects. In the research phase, persuasive writing aims to justify the need for the STEM solution: Why does the problem need to be solved? Deepen the meaning of the question by embedding it in an authentic scenario–the GRASPS can help.
Use informative writing to explain the building and testing steps. Argument writing is supported in the evaluation phase of the STEM design cycle when justifying the success of the solution based on evidence from the testing.
Explore and Embrace Failure
Failure will be part of any STEM unit where a solution is tested against one, some, or all of the design specifications. By exploring the facets of failure, students can see it as more of a nuanced tutor rather than a black-and-white indicator of their intelligence.
Failure can also be defined in more than one way. For example, I taught a pasta bridge unit during my first year in MYP Design. The problem was to build a pasta bridge as light, as strong, and as long as possible. We found out during testing that failure was incremental. Sometimes, we heard the sound of snapping pasta before seeing any changes in the bridges. Could that snapping-pasta event be characterized as a type of failure? Other bridges bent to the point where no reasonable vehicle could pass over them. Is a bent bridge a failed bridge?
I taught the unit once, and if I were to teach it again, the definition of a successful solution (which is predicated on failure) would have to be redefined. By spending more time exploring the aspects of failure, teachers and students cultivate a growth mindset and build a knowledge base for future research. STEM failures, especially those developed from thoughtful procedural steps, are treasures to be showcased and studied.
Build Grit
A commitment to a long-term STEM project communicates to stakeholders the value STEM offers in developing many skill areas (e.g., 21st-century skills). Sequencing STEM learning through design steps builds a commitment to the deliberate nature of the problem-solving process.
MYP Design units can take about six weeks to complete. When I started teaching it with sixth graders (their first official class with a formal design process), many assumed we would be building the design right away! After their first unit, they were introduced to the purposeful roles of targeted research, developing precise design specifications, and creating a detailed step-by-step building plan. Student dedication to each design step builds grit, a fundamental problem-solving, and life skill.
Through the STEM PBL design process, students constantly revisit and examine the problem over time. Each “visit” to the problem is an opportunity to understand the problem better. This perseverance in reviewing the issue helps students be proficient problem solvers.
Promote Cradle to Cradle Design
What is cradle-to-cradle design? The goal of cradle-to-cradle design is to minimize waste in the design process. Looking back, in the pasta bridge unit, my partner and I gave each student group too much pasta for each bridge. We could have had just as much quality learning with less waste.
The design process should be emphasized as the design cycle. In many cases, STEM resources flow from step to step. EPEA refers to expired products serving as “technical nutrients” (cool term) for future products.
In the K-12 classroom, cradle-to-cradle design can be emphasized in many ways and across different subject areas. For example, for the paper helicopter experiment, print the templates on used paper. For the paper water tank engineering problem, we included a design specification that helped students be mindful of how to manage the water after testing.
Engaging STEM projects can be done with minimal resources. When creating an engineering trade-off problem, such as how to build the tallest free-standing paper tower, will half a sheet of office paper suffice, or does it have to be a whole sheet? Does it have to be a new paper? Cradle-to-cradle design involves hacking away at the resources used in the STEM design cycle to get the most benefit with the least waste.
To the greatest extent possible, photograph or screenshot STEM designs and video the tests during the building and testing/evaluation phases. Curate these media to share with future classes to add value and credibility to the research step. Examining successful and unsuccessful designs can honor the spirit of cradle-to-cradle design.
Getting Started with Long Term STEM Projects
If you’re new to long-term STEM projects, start small. No need to do too much at once, especially if you’re not typically teaching STEM or STEAM. Writing is a natural fit and adds purpose to the project. What are you writing about in language arts? STEM writing prompts can bring science and math to life.
What’s helped me a lot has been to start planning by structuring the project in phases. You can sequence STEM learning most easily by chunking the instruction and activities into the steps of the design cycle:
- A. Analyze a Need (Research a Problem)
- B. Develop Ideas
- C. Create a Prototype
- D. Test and Evaluate
For example, paper airplane design offers a low-cost and easy STEM project for elementary or middle school. In this example, students spent three class periods of 45 minutes each going through each step of an entire design cycle, trying to make an airplane fly far and straight. With regard to STEM, we applied skills from each area to solve the problem:
- Science – controlling variables
- Technology – tracking flight data with Google Sheets
- Engineering – exploring different shapes (triangular vs. rectangular) to meet the goal
- Math – calculating maximum, minimums, and averages
Before starting the first phase of researching the need, set up the scenario using the GRASPS model format to structure the problem-based learning intuitively. Check out this GRASPS for paper helicopter design. Writing a GRASPS first is a great way to start planning for a long-term STEM project.
Use what you know. You can develop meaningful STEM learning experiences with materials you have in your classroom. You’ll feel more prepared by organizing your thinking, STEM lesson resources, and your students’ learning through distinct design steps. Curriculum standards can help focus your thinking, and students’ “why” questions might inspire a problem to be explored through STEM or STEAM.
Summary of Long Term STEM Projects
The benefits of long-term STEM projects teach children real-world skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving. Hands-on problem-solving experiences that bridge multiple subjects help students see the bigger picture to strengthen their ability to leverage resources to create solutions. How are you going to extend STEM learning to help your students?