To develop positive, productive and collaborative digital age STEM learning environments, educators can help students develop troubleshooting skills and provide opportunities for them to share their ideas with their peers and with communities outside of the classroom. Creative problem solving can help students with everyday tasks in the tech-enhanced classroom, and will also foster a sense of self-reliance that will help them engage confidently in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practice of obtaining evaluating and communicating information.
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) standards call for coaches to create and support effective digital age learning environments to maximize the learning of all students. Coaches can support educators and students to “troubleshoot basic software, hardware, and connectivity problems common in digital learning environments” (ISTE standard 3e for coaches) first by fostering creativity and a growth mindset in classrooms. If teachers praise the process of student learning over the product, students will feel more comfortable trying new things and gain greater metacognitive awareness and ownership over their learning.
Grubbs (2015) adds humor to the development of growth mindset and resilience to failure by encouraging students to “laugh” at and find humor in failures during learning. “This skill is not only relevant, but arguably a pre
STEM educators can relate the process of troubleshooting to how the iterative processes of science and engineering (web site and lesson plan from Berkeley) can lead help scientists solve problems and make to new discoveries (video from Academy of Sciences).
g.) use digital communication and collaboration tools to communicate locally and globally with students, parents, peers, and the larger community.
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS or “Next Gen Computational thinking In the high school performance expectation for Engineering Design students “use a computer simulation to model the impact of proposed solutions to a complex real-world problem with numerous criteria and constraints on interactions within and between systems relevant to the problem.” In the high school Next Generation Science Standard for Earth and Human activity, students “create a computational simulation to illustrate the relationships among the management of natural resources, the sustainability of human populations, and biodiversity.”
Link to my post about computational thinking in the science classroom
What do you think?
Resources
Grubbs, M. g. (2015). Laughing at failure: Troubleshooting paper structures. Children’s Technology & Engineering, 19(4), 8-10.
