One of the projects of the Anatolian Maker Movement took place in Kocaeli. In order to teach the philosophy of STEM and create an self-sustainable environment, we worked with primary school children of a public school in Kocaeli.
Starting from “Scratch”, we worked towards their improvement and growth towards innovation and technology. The progress that we observed in the children was unbelievable. Starting from the little sparkle of curiosity in the children’s mind, a path towards a fire of numerous skills, questions, and projects led us through as the children became more and more passionate in their learning process during our workshops proceeded. It was amazing to see the products after letting children imagine, try, fail, and have fun in their experience freely. We ended up with nearly 90 different, creative, and colorful Scratch projects all made by kids of ages 8 and 9.
Starting from “Scratch”, we worked towards their improvement and growth towards innovation and technology. The progress that we observed in the children was unbelievable. Starting from the little sparkle of curiosity in the children’s mind, a path towards a fire of numerous skills, questions, and projects led us through as the children became more and more passionate in their learning process during our workshops proceeded. It was amazing to see the products after letting children imagine, try, fail, and have fun in their experience freely. We ended up with nearly 90 different, creative, and colorful Scratch projects all made by kids of ages 8 and 9.
Later on, when it was time to move to teaching children about the terms and words of the STEM world, we introduced them our board game “Arcopolis”, which includes stations of engineering-related words, such as “keyboard censor”, “lithium battery”, and “periscope”. They were very surprised to learn that we were the ones who planned, designed, prepared and produced Arcopolis, and they were very excited to try our “homemade” game. By playing Arcopolis, children learned topics that varied from the inventors of the airplane to the different parts of a calculator. Though they were learning a significant amount of information, we never saw children being distracted or bored while learning these, which was one of the biggest benefits of using a game as a tool to teach: it was clearly more effective to use fun and competition in communicating with children instead of loading them with tons of new words. The bright questions and contributions of the children to the game made it even more fun and informative. We also had the chance to listen to their creative and constructive feedback about Arcopolis, which made us feel more than proud. It was beneficial that Arcopolis brang a different and much more effective aspect to our community involvement project: a feeling of competition that fueled the children’s desire to keep expanding their knowledge, sharing it with their friends, and using it in a fun way.
At the end of the week, we saw how children progressed from no knowledge to a sufficient amount of knowledge in the basics of STEM and one of the world’s most used coding languages: Scratch. In fact, to make sure that they actually understood the vocabulary to use in their future studies, we let the children enjoy the Kahoot contest we created, which had tens of questions about the new vocabulary they learned, the Scratch terms and techniques, and the basics of FIRST. Seeing that they were all very enthusiastic in learning and sharing their knowledge in all of these topics and full of new information, we said “goodbye” to them at ease. In the end, we waved to their smiling faces and sparkling eyes, in which we saw the future of STEM and the world.
At the end of the week, we saw how children progressed from no knowledge to a sufficient amount of knowledge in the basics of STEM and one of the world’s most used coding languages: Scratch. In fact, to make sure that they actually understood the vocabulary to use in their future studies, we let the children enjoy the Kahoot contest we created, which had tens of questions about the new vocabulary they learned, the Scratch terms and techniques, and the basics of FIRST. Seeing that they were all very enthusiastic in learning and sharing their knowledge in all of these topics and full of new information, we said “goodbye” to them at ease. In the end, we waved to their smiling faces and sparkling eyes, in which we saw the future of STEM and the world.