High-impact STEM Events to Foster Collaboration

I made an effort to attend as many STEAM sessions as I could while I was at ALA, and probably the best one I attended was this one about High-Impact STEM Events to Foster Collaboration. There I was able to hear and meet Liz McChesney, director of Chicago Public Library, and Brian Wunar of the Museum of Science and Industry, who shared how they collaborated on science programs at both the museum and the library.

Both CPL and MSI had a similar audience and a similar mission: they came together "to serve the same children." CPL's Areas of Impact are: Building basic literacy, building digital, informational and cultural literacy, advancing critical thinking and problem solving, advancing creativity and innovation and fostering communication and collaboration. Brian showed us MSI's "Steering Wheel" diagram for what their mission is: Youth are at the Center, encircled by Families, Communities and Schools which all give influence and support to Youth. As an organization, MSI decided they needed to put their emphasis on youth and education.

Liz discussed findings from the National Summer Learning Association, like:

Why summer slide is so damaging and why summer learning loss is so dangerous

How middle income children move ahead between kindergarten and 1st grade, while low income children move back

How upper income families have increased the amount they spend on extracurriculars and tutoring, while low income families have decreased theirs

When Liz first came to Brian to discuss doing a STEM theme for summer reading, he asked: "Instead of just reading about STEM, shouldn't we be doing STEM?"

Chicago's new summer reading program includes museum STEAM learning and design thinking for children of all ages. They incorporate books and do STEAM activities to extend the story. So when they did a program on Caps for Sale about the peddler who keeps losing his caps, kids were asked to design something to keep your cap on your head. What a great idea!

MSI offered a lot of support, both in the form of donated time for professional development for library staff, and donated time from teen volunteers they call "STEAM ambassadors." These teens do programs teaching kids, and the library's own teen volunteers support by listening and helping the kids apply what the MSI teens teach them.

CPL's "Explore and Soar" Summer Learning Challenge in 2015 had three components:

The Read component incorporated ECRR2 (Talk, sing, read, write, play).

The Explore component had 8 sets of activities you could do at home, one set for each week of Summer Learning Challenge. The library worked with MSI to create these booklets with instructions for what to do. Everything could be done using household materials. They called it "Summer Brain Games." They also made sure that if you had to buy anything, it would be under $20.

The Create component was "Curiosity Kits"--40-60 design challenges for kids, put out in a binder clip. I think they put it out for kids to work on these designs in the library as a passive program. Liz talked briefly about how the "Sound of Learning" can be noisy, but in fact she said incidents of noise complains actually went down, because kids were always engaged!

A really nice thing they were able to offer was paid summer jobs for high school students. They hired 58 teens across 32 library branches to help with administering these STEAM programs.

And one of the coolest things about this, in my opinion, was that Chicago Public Library was able to get data to show that SLC-involved youth outperformed their expectations, showing 20% gain in mathematics and a 15% gain in reading proficiency. How did they get this data? It came through a partnership with University of Illinois researchers and a backdoor data agreement. The university researchers were able to get data on how kids were doing in school, and then strip all other data away except for whether a child participated in the Summer Learning Challenge.

They shared the idea behind this year's Rahm's Readers Summer Learning Challenge too. I saw ads for it all throughout Chicago at bus stops whenever I went out. Their ads look like a comic book, calling on kids to beat "Dr. Brain Drain"!

At this session we also heard from several representatives of starnetlibraries.org. They've created Teacher's Guides and a wonderful STEM Activity Clearinghouse full of ideas which I will certainly be using for my programs!

I also got to hear about the NASA@MyLibrary grant, which was a collaboration with ALA, NASA, STARNet and other organizations to make materials and training available to libraries so that they could do STEM programming. They talked about how you can leverage high-visibility NASA missions, Earth and celestial events to form collaborations with NASA for library programs. A few of the major events that NASA is especially interested in partnering with libraries on is International Observe the Moon Night and Earth Day. In many cases NASA and JPL have already created great resources that they would like to promote in the public library. One of these is NASA's moontrek.org -- it's a web resource that lets you explore the moon in amazing depth! Later, I met Emily Law at the NASA booth, the lead on the moontrek.org team, who is from JPL! She would love to work with us on an Observe the Moon Night event so I gave her my card.

Keliann LaConte talked about Project BUILD: Building Using an Interactive Learning Design. They have some amazing program ideas as well as publications and curriculum materials, so I'll be digging in for material for my STEM programs.

After the presentations, everyone at the program got to split up and visit different stations to try some hands-on science programs you can do with kids. I really liked this one that LaConte and the Project BUILD people shared. They had three "planets" made out of frappuccino lids, taped together to hold unseen objects (some of them probably metal objects) wrapped and hidden with tissue paper. You ask kids to learn as much as they can about the planets by weighing them on a scale, finding their magnetic poles using a magnaprobe -- a compass that will show you an object's magnetic field in 3D -- and an infrared thermometer to find out what the temperature inside the "planet" is. Kids learn how scientists gather data about a new or unknown planet's mass, poles, and temperature to make additional predictions about the planet. I'd like to try this at a program and see how much the kids can figure out!

I also really liked the Earth Day 2018 station and the adorable fortune teller game NASA made using a common tween timesucker to teach kids about clouds! I came away with great ideas I can't wait to implement here.