What is this Exploration?
STEMgineering is an exploration that studied about engineering, type of engineering and creating STEM project for government students to become interested and excited in STEM because the government school’s curriculum doesn’t include this subject. And the main goal of this exploration. As we come up with the STEM project ideas that all children all over Cambodia can use, we had to think that the projects have to be sustainable and Cambodia-friendly.
What have we learned about engineer in this exploration?
Before starting this STEM project ideas, we got introduced to engineer, type of engineer and what they do. We started with all of the six simple machines such as wheel and axle, lever, pulley, inclined plane, wedge and screw. To learn about this, we divided into group and research one type of the machine, then we’ll share with our classmate through presentation. We also get to do an activity about this which finding the material with these simple machines in campus and watch many videos related to the topic to understand more about it. After that, we had learned about the Design process which is the series of step that engineer follow to come up with a solution to the problem. After learning and following all these steps, our projects is really effective.
Our STEM project!
Then, we started brainstorming ideas of the projects that we wanna create for the government school. And what i’ve learned about brainstorming ideas is that it’s all about “quantity, not quality”. We we successfully creating and prototyping our projects, we went to two different government schools to showcase our project. The challenge that we face is that it’s hard to get those students engage with our project. However, as we had this experience, we tried to play games with them first to get to know more about each other in our second trip and that was successful. The students learned a lot and they were so excited in STEM. This make me felt so happy and proud and teaching, explaining other people is my favorite thing to do. Overall, i’ve learned much about engineering in this exploration and this was my first engineering class ever.