[Catalist] STEM - no philosophy, no definition, but a set of opportunities nonetheless

[Leon Harris]

Hi Roy,
Yes, I did something similar for microbial fuel cells.
We made a few, measured voltage over weeks, fed it glucose etc, and then 
went out to Ralf Cords lab at Murdoch to see how they did it. Done as a 
science club, and sent off to win a years subscription to Helix. 
However, you are on the mark when you say that we don't yet have the 
structure to award marks for such things. This was done after school as 
a club.

However, replacing a ticker timer lab in a Y11 Physics class with 
something more modern, and interesting, and giving another way of 
looking at the ratio that is acceleration was quite worthwhile, and in 
my opinion did "cut it". A whole load of kids used up a double and some 
homework to do some rather nice integration of ict/math/coding and 
science, including kids who had never seen code before. Of course, this 
was a few years ago, when iphone 4s were still cool!

This leads to another aspect of STEM problem - do we focus on the 
exemplars, or do we take a "science for all" approach? How do we balance 
distributing our resources across those two priorities?

Thanks for the replies so far, this is getting interesting!

Cheers,
Leon