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Laurel School students get 'outside the box'
(by Sue Hoffman - May 12, 2011)
Laurel School students get 'outside the box'
By SUE HOFFMAN
For Sara Hull and Jacquelyn Ellis, of Pepper Pike, the best subjects in sixth grade are in the humanities. Sara prefers social studies and Jacquelyn's choice class is English.
However, both students at Laurel School in Shaker Heights recently discovered their enjoyment of hands-on experiences ranging from baking cookies to making small robotic bugs and taking apart broken appliances. The events took place during Tinkering Week at the school's Butler campus in Russell.
Sara and Jacquelyn said they wondered whether they would like a week of putting things together, pulling things apart and making their own creations, but they did.
"When we got out here, it was a lot more fun," Sara said.
This was Laurel's third annual Tinkering Week for sixth-graders, science and social studies teacher Soraya Ahmad said, just before leading a session of building boats out of paper cups, tape and straws.
She said the activities aim to give girls practice solving problems "outside of the box."
"The week is meant to give the students several opportunities to live out the trope, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again,' and encourages the girls to use the design process," she said. That process is brainstorm, sketch, model, test and redesign, also known as tinkering.
The annual event evolved from a 2009 article Lisa Damour, co-director of Laurel's Center for Research on Girls, wrote for Education Week.
In the article Dr. Damour said while girls have made real strides in the sciences, boys significantly outnumber girls in engineering and computer science. Many explanations have been offered, but she said, "Here's another explanation: Girls don't tinker." According to her research, boys see computers and mechanical devices as toys, a perspective that encourages tinkering.
"Why don't girls tinker? The answers aren't clear, but for starters, it seems that adults don't encourage them to," she wrote.
Tinkering Week provided much encouragement. The girls built bat boxes from kits to help house and protect Northeast Ohio's bat population. They were given materials and instructions and encouraged to work together to figure out how to assemble each piece.
"They are learning to use some basic materials and tools - screwdrivers, drills, caulk, primer and paint," Ms. Ahmad said.
Another event was a trebuchet competition. Girls worked in teams using a limited materials list to build either a trebuchet or catapult to fling minimarshmallows at a castle.
"They are allowed to do additional research on these siege weapons prior to the activity, but the entire piece must be assembled from start to finish during the 45-minute time limit," Ms. Ahmad said.
Jacquelyn's favorite activity was to create small robotic "jitterbugs" using recycled compact discs, paper clips, a small motor and simple circuit. Students decorated their bugs and could adjust the design to see the effect on the bugs' movement. They looked like they were dancing, Jacquelyn said.
Sara liked the rotation on tinkering with cookies. Students first made chocolate chip cookies from a basic recipe. The second part of the project was to create their own recipe and judge the results.
"We added a little more baking powder and salt and put in marshmallows and breadcrumbs," Sara said. She preferred their special creation. "They were a little more salty," she said. "I liked the marshmallows."
During Tinkering Week, Laurel students spent one morning with 50 girls from the Warner Girls Leadership Academy in Cleveland in a variety of activities. They built visual math puzzles, identified mystery objects and designed boats that could hold a weight of 25 pennies for 10 seconds, using straws, plastic wrap, duct tape and a paper cup.
Rounding out the program were opportunities to pull apart broken appliances and electronics, design a lunar landing and tinker with Shakespeare's words in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
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