In late September my class and I participated in the Global Cardboard Challenge. The challenge encourages creativity and making, as well as STEAM by encouraging students to create anything they wish out of cardboard and recycled materials. We began our provocation with watching the Caine’s Arcade video and generating ideas and creating sketches. Students were interested in creating their own arcade games. We then began collecting boxes and then the real fun and messiness began!
As our school has a TLLP Grant with the Ministry of Education to embed and develop STEAM/Makerspace experiences. I decided to tie in our work in science on forces into the arcade project and ask the students to think about “How they see forces at work in their arcade games?” Many students connected their games to gravitational force as well as muscular force and used examples of push and pull forces. Then the real fun began with building our arcade games!
We also had the opportunity to Skype with Steve Auslander’s class in Indianapolis and share each others games via Skype in the Classroom.
When our arcade was complete, we created a letter together to send to classes to invite them to come try out our games and requesting a donation for charity.
We encouraged students to provide feedback and give us suggestions for ways to improve our games. Our arcade raised almost $300 in donations.
As a class, we decided to donate the money to a local food bank in our community called The Compass. We then started to prepare for a shopping trip to buy items to donate by examining grocery store flyers. We discussed media literacy and how advertisers use colour to sell their products and how everything tends to look perfect in the flyers which is not realistic. Since students are expected to work with amounts up to $10 they were instructed to create a shopping list of items to buy at the store after we did some research on what food was most needed. Students then created their own shopping lists for our trip to the store.
We headed out to one of our local grocery stores to do our shopping and brought reusable grocery bags, the eco-friendly thing to do which also saved us money as there is a five cent charge per grocery bag. We also discussed grocery store etiquette which included: don’t block the aisles and return any items you don’t buy to their original location. At the store, we examined where food was from and how buying local supports our local farmers and is the environmentally conscious thing to do. We discussed things like price matching, and how companies pay to have items placed at eye level, reading labels and how the healthier food tends to be placed around the perimeter of the grocery store. Then we headed upstairs to make our own lunch and treats at the PC Cooking School.
Back at the school we demonstrated our learning by using the Explain Everything App to document our learning as well as what we would have done differently.
The students’ engagement and the learning opportunities provided were amazing! I am grateful for the opportunity to co-learn and be able to do something positive for our local community.