A Trip to the Science Carnival with Kevin Spracher

This weekend I had the pleasure of traveling to the Ventura County STEM Science Carnival with Samantha and Stephanie.  We brought the mystery tubes and set up at a table in a sea of tables.  At first, I was worried that people wouldn't be interested in our activity because there was so much flashy stuff around.  We were right in between "Instant Snow" and something with big water tanks.  But I forgot how magical the mystery can be when you haven't seen them before.  My favorite part of the evening was seeing face after face go from mild disinterest to some form of astonishment/wonder/confusion.  It happened so consistently I could pinpoint when it was about to appear.  While it was hectic and exhausting to facilitate the activity so many times, it was really helpful to see it play out in rapid succession.  Practicing in that context made it easy to fine tune my facilitating.  I think even more so than doing the activity many times at the museum, constantly resetting and re-engaging people was uniquely helpful.  I wonder if we could do some kind of rapid-fire training session on the program carts - like speed dating but with facilitation, and it would be fun.

In other news, I really liked the NSTA chapter on engineering practices.  In the beginning of the chapter, they talk about the importance of understanding the differences between science and engineering practices, but that in the real world scientists might often have to step in and out of both fields.  I'm wondering about how I can make this more explicit when I'm teaching.  But also, how important is it for students to know what practices they are engaged in?  Can teaching the steps in the engineering practice be separate from engaging in them?  I've been reading elsewhere about the importance of meta-cognition in self-directed learning i.e. teaching people to reflect on their thinking in order to give them more control in their learning process.  What does the research say about how knowing the steps of a practice affects learners' success in using that practice?  My intuition tells me that of course it's important, but sometimes when teaching the steps of the design process I feel like students are bored and it would be better to just get them building. But maybe that would end up being too unstructured and not as valuable.


PS!  I just happened to find this video, totally by accident, that is super relevant.