I recently had the pleasure of meeting and working with sixty afterschool staff of Canyon Independent School District. Debbie Collier, Director of Afterschool Programs has incorporated a STEM component within all Canyon ISD afterschool programs. During the day long STEM-based professional staff development session afterschool staff were introduced to the foundational principles of STEM, inquiry-based teaching and learning, journaling, engineering design process, incorporating STEM-based children’s literature and more.

We started off the session by conducting hands-on-minds-on investigations to explore materials science. Participants used affordable technology and digital tools to analyze building and packaging materials as well as super absorbing polymers. We then went on to discover how geometry and architecture are connected via building 3 dimensional geometric structures. 

Further into the session participants were given the challenge of designing, building and testing a roller coaster like structure that would move a marble from point A to B, having loops, jumps, and twists. The roller coasters were built using readily available materials as well as recycled materials.

The end of the training was spent on introducing afterschool staff to incorporating tinkering and take apart centers within their afterschool programs. Participants were given the task of taking apart broken household gadgets, toys, and out-dated electronics. Participants were also taught how to incorporate components within the disassembled gadgets to make new gadgets, sculptures and more.

Participants kept journals throughout the training, and also had the opportunity to read numerous children’s STEM-themed books.

This was such a highly motivated group, they truly embraced the importance of incorporating STEM practices and content within afterschool programs. I have been told by the district administration as well as many of the afterschool staff that incorporating STEM explorations within their afterschool programs has been extremely successful. The children really enjoy the daily STEM challenges as well as visiting the STEM exploratory centers such as the “Take – Apart Gadget Center” etc.. The following photos are a sampling of some of the STEM investigations the afterschool staff conducted during the day long STEM-based professional staff development designed for afterschool staff.