What do Kids Need to Learn to be Engineers?

What skills do kids need to be engineers?

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Learning engineering with Starfire is the perfect way to help foster creativity and strengthen the natural engineering skills that all kids are born with!

Starfire students learn what engineers do and the skills they need to be an engineer, now and in the future! Read on to learn more about what kids need to be junior engineers! 
Creativity and Imagination

Do your kids like to build things with blocks? Do they like to play video games that allow them to create characters and different objects?

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When they do these things, they’re using their creativity and imagination. Good engineers use these two skills every day. Curiosity drives engineers to explore and create new things.

Problem Solving Skills

Engineers spend their days asking interesting, complex questions and generating answers using Engineering Design Process. All engineers need good problem-solving skills!

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Starfire students build problem solving skills in our hands-on, project-based engineering challenges. Kids design, test, build and improve their projects using design thinking and the engineering design process.

Collaboration

Engineers need to be able to work alone as well as with a team.

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Starfire students use their initiative as well as their collaboration skills in our small classes! Classes never exceed 5 students.

STEAM Learning

All of the elements of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math) are important when it comes to being an engineer. For example, civil engineers use art to create buildings and bridges that are pleasing to look at while also being able to stand tall. 

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Starfire Engineering classes integrate science, math, technology and the arts into fun, hands-on projects that showcase the richness of engineering!

Join us in our virtual classroom for classes starting May 3. Register today to start the engineering fun!

Why put the "A" in "STEAM" Learning?

Lots of educators and learning communities are talking about STEAM education. You may be asking, why include an arts perspective in STEM learning?

Starfire STEAM programming (STEM+Arts) links the creative arts to science, technology, engineering and math to give students the tools they need to the innovators, educators, leaders, and learners of the 21st century! 

By integrating art with STEM, Starfire gives students the creative spark to harness the capabilities of STEM skills. Our students fuse an in-depth knowledge of STEM with a focus on arts to creatively integrate and apply that knowledge to solve real world problems. 

Starfire teachers share their passion for the creative arts with our students. Art and creativity infuse Starfire’s enrichment classes, Fun with STEAM virtual labs and MathTastic Help sessions.

Starfire STEAM students take thoughtful risks, engage in experiential learning, persist in problem-solving, embrace collaboration, and work through creative processes. Students learn more and they retain more of what they learn. 

Find out more about what STEAM education can do for your child by checking out our current courses or getting in touch with the Starfire support team!

STEAM Challenge - Build a Boat!

Kids can engage in vibrant and plentiful STEAM learning opportunities, even in the tub! Check out this awesome challenge and let the fun flow.

Build a Boat:

Materials

• Aluminum foil square, recommended size: 6” x 6”

• Weights: Pennies, marbles, beans, LEGO figures will work. You just need something consistent

• Water

• Pan, sink, bathtub

Do This!

• Take a single sheet of aluminum foil, 6” x 6” works well, and fold it flat, pressing out all the air.

• Continue folding until you can’t make it any smaller. Will this little square of foil sink or float? Try it!

• You'll find that it sinks!

Now Try This!

• Now unfold the foil and fold it into a boat shape. Add some weight. You can use pennies, marbles, or even toy figures. How many weights can it hold?

• For an added challenge:

  • Race your boats in the tub!

  • See how many boats can you build and test in an hour?

  • Guess the maximum load for your boat - were you close?

Talk About This!

"Can you redesign a foil boat to hold even more weight?"
"What’s the most weight it can hold?"

Engineers and designers use the Design Thinking Process to solve problems. This means that they think about the problem, the end user, design a possible solution, test it, then try again to see if they can improve.

Why This Works!
Why could the same piece of foil not only float, but hold even more weight? Water has a buoyant force that pushes up, while gravity is pushing down. By spreading out the weight of the foil (unfolding it) the water had more area to push up on, decreasing the density of the “boat.”

Don’t feel comfortable going into the concepts of buoyancy or density? That’s okay! Focus more on the engineering design process of empathizing, building, testing, and iterating based on what you’ve discovered.

At Starfire, student learn to solve problems like designers and engineers. They are given a problem and constraints. Then they use their imagination to come up with an answer!

Speed vs Depth in STEAM Learning

Starfire teachers encourage depth, creativity and fluency in STEAM learning. We know that every student can be a “math person” or “science person” with the right encouragement and support!

Many students incorrectly believe that being good at STEAM learning means being fast. In our classes, we dissociate success from speed.

When we value fast computation over other skills, we discourage deep thinking, risk taking and meaningful progress. Starfire teachers teach students to think deeply, connect methods, reason, and justify their methods. 

Winter Session Updates

We are thrilled to be touching base with our Starfire community at the mid-point of Winter Session 2019. We are excited to be collaborating on critical thinking skill development, deep learning, and fun with our Starfire students.  

Class News
The Starfire curriculum emphasizes exploration and hands-on-learning over memorization.  This generates useful context for students that is helpful in learning and retaining new skills.  

Here are som fun examples of activities and challenges happening in Starfire classrooms:

• Luyi’s Art & Design class at La Entrada worked to turn 2D shapes into 3D forms.  The students created masks out of their newly formed 3D shapes.

• Tejal’s Electrical Engineering class at Brewer Island learned the concept of insulators vs. conductors and how those concepts apply to real world engineering scenarios.

• Jennifer’s Math class at Escondido completed a highly interactive workshop estimating the number of gems in a glass and the length of a string. Students were asked to explain/defend their reasoning and encouraged to risk conjectures.

Teacher Spotlight
We are proud of the enthusiastic, credentialed and dedicated teachers at Starfire.  We would love to share some information about one of the newest members of our team, Samina. Our Starfire Education instructor Samina started her career as a software engineer, working at places like Cisco and Oracle doing software development. More recently, she has focused on being a Technical Trainer and coding Instructor in a variety of settings. Samina is also community minded! She is involved in the training department of Women in Big Data.

She is also a mom to two teenage boys who share her love of reading, computers and museums. She has enjoyed mentoring her boys and wants to share that enjoyment with Starfire Education students.

Starfire Learning Tools
Design Thinking is one of the pedagogical tools our students use to solve problems.  The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize and glean insights. Design thinking is a strategy for solving problems through creativity, and innovation. Starfire teachers help students apply the skills used by designers to solve problems posed in their classrooms, whether they are posed in math, coding or engineering classes.  Design thinking as a problem solving method was developed at Stanford, and is a growing feature of STEM education. We love the research coming out of REDLab at Stanford University Graduate School of Education and its focus on the use of Design Thinking in K-12 Education.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/redlab/cgi-bin/publications_resources.php

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