This April, the STEM department at Whittle launched our first ever Inventor's Fair in honor of World Creativity and Innovation Week! Our students get to do so much building and making in the daily STEM curriculum, but we wanted to give them a chance to show off what they can do outside of school, too. This Inventor's Fair was open to all students in grades 1-12, and we had over 100 participants sign up! In the end, over 60 individuals and groups brought their own inventions to the competition on Saturday May 22. After our special guest judges from a local tech company and STEM teachers scored each project, we awarded a LOT of prizes, and everyone also got a participation certificate to recognize their hard work. It was also a lot of work for us to organize, but it was worth it to see the amazing inventions that our students created!
The idea came when I was talking with my great STEM partner Emma, who is the head of Middle School STEM at Whittle. We wanted to work together with our robust House Systems coordinator Jasmine to promote STEM and creativity for those students who love to go above and beyond. It can be tricky to coordinate a large competitive event as a new school, but our operations team, administration and the rest of the STEM department were really supportive in making this event a reality!
In April, we launched the event at our Monday assembly, and STEM teachers started distributing the Logbooks that go through every step of the engineering design process. To make their inventions, we had students follow the Ask / Imagine / Plan / Create / Test / Improve cycle. We decided to create 3 different logbooks for our different age groups, and you can see them here:
Participants were judged on a combination of factors, including originality, execution, and the level of detail in their plan. Most of our younger students needed help from their parents to finish the Logbook, but they came up with really creative ideas, like a collapsable umbrella for bird nests and an automatic watering system for plants. Our older students used the opportunity to develop some of their own personal projects, like building a lunar lander and creating biodegradable "plastic" from plant based materials.
Although it was a huge success, there's still room for improvement! Looking forward to next year, we'll have to adjust the timing of the judging, because it ran over by about half an hour. I'll also make sure that we have separate categories for the group and the individual entries, to simplify the awards process. Given that my team was so supportive and the administration was impressed, I can't wait to get started planning for next year!
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