The brief: Design a dream house that will still be amazing in 50 years time This month, students added ‘house design’ to their list of school holiday activities! Despite all the interruptions to school and life that the pandemic has caused, Innovation Sports Clubs have started in schools to give students the chance to learn the Design Thinking framework. This six-part process teaches students how to explore a topic, define it, discuss ideas, prototype a solution, test it, and then iterate it into a final design. STEM Punks Innovation Sports takes this framework and adds a STEM-focused challeng ..read more

Overview Temperature monitoring systems in the Antarctic Ocean, dust sensors in regional areas to alert change in weather conditions and monitoring systems for cattle were just a few of the innovative ideas generated by the students at St Mary’s College in Term One of 2019. Five teams of students were challenged to code the micro:bit and use this technology as a tool to solve real world environmental issues. Throughout the STEMPunks Innovation Program the students were led through ‘Design Thinking’ processes to understand their user, ideate solutions, use 3D design and printing to prototype th ..read more

For the past month I have been undertaking my own project-based learning. After a couple of months with STEM Punks, I wanted to make the logo - a robot - into earrings and keyrings to take with me to schools and events. I wanted show students how STEM can turn an idea into an amazing creation. I first pictured the robots as 3D-printed pieces. I wrote down the shapes that would make up this robot, (semi-spheres, cubes, cylinders etc.) and got to work with a free 3D design tutorial on Tinkercad. After learning how to 3D design, I was able to put the shapes together in a 3D space. I was excited t ..read more

These are the buzzwords in education that we have heard around the world recently. There is a massive push for it, and, after trying it out for the past 6 months, I understand why. Essentially, Project Based Learning is exactly what it says in the title. Students will have a project / goal / task and then acquire skills to complete a project. Problem Based Learning is where students define a real-world problem, understand it, analyse it, then work on solving that problem. This project is end-to-end - from ideation, to prototyping, and finally communicating why this is a successful solution. Pr ..read more

Why do we still teach and praise the effort of teaching recall? Not a lot has changed in the past thirty years as students are still doing the same tests in the same rooms to gain a ‘leg up’ to attend the best universities. There is going to be a shift very soon about what is actually valued in schools, as we are heading into a new era: the digitalised era. Humans have limited things that will outperform in the ‘machine nation’. Creative mindsets, innovation, and empathy are going to be highly sought after attributes, as these are things that the digitalised world cannot replicate. There are ..read more

Remote Area STEM Program Lockhart River State School 2018 Lockhart River State School worked with STEM Punks to create immersive an immersive STEM experience for their primary and secondary year students. The program was developed to enable an environment for hands-on learning an to spark an interest in STEM subjects. The program was delivered over four days and the content was tailored to suit the individual student skill-levels and alignment with the Australian Curriculum. As an introduction to coding, the students were exposed to Visual Block Coding as a first step. Concepts including algo ..read more

Environmental Monitoring Project Ipswich Girls Grammar 2018 The Ipswich Girls Grammar School undertook the four week ‘Innovation & Entrepreneurship’ program on the topic of Environmental Monitoring. Six teams were challenged to develop a new and innovative product or service for environmental monitoring. The program covered key topics on innovation and Entrepreneurship and the application of STEM skills in IOT (Internet of Things) and App Design. As an introduction to the program, the students explored ‘Design Thinking’ and the importance of customer-centric design when developing a new p ..read more

Hydro Power Project Springfield Anglican College 2018 The Springfield Anglican College Year 10 Altitude classroom in partnership with STEM Punks, has offered a group of our high ability students the opportunity to challenge themselves in a non-traditional classroom context, where the emphasis is on extended problem solving and autonomous learning. There is also a focus on supporting students to understand and develop key 21st Century skills, as recognised through our TSAC Learner Framework. This semester, students have focussed on critical and creative thinking skills , collaboration, and ref ..read more

After travelling the past month around the USA, I have found Australia has some rather striking similarities. Education is progressing slowly, the divide between the have and have-nots is increasing and the teachers are frustrated. Now I can see the frustration - an enthusiastic student comes out of University to enter teaching, only to be welcomed with consistent data reforms, administration pressures and an unrelenting pressure from society to be mistake free. A teacher never came into the job for this - a teacher is a person that chooses to inspire, educate and make a difference... how can ..read more

The STEMPunks team recently travelled to San Francisco and Austin in the USA. Our desire was to find out what the world was doing in STEM and how STEMPunks could become a world provider in STEM education. A couple of things we wanted to discover: 1. Emerging technologies While at Maker Faire we knew that we would see some amazing technologies, we also knew that some of these ideas we could implement into our programs in Australia and around the world. We believe that continually being in contact with the world’s best, we can continually provide the best content to students, schools, and teach ..read more