Ever wondered what a year in the life of another teacher looks like? Ever wonder what a year of doing project-based, interdisciplinary learning in a makerspace looks like? Trey Smith is a K - 8 digital literacy teacher in Philadelphia. He is sharing details on his units, approach to educational design, and reflections on where to go next. You'll leave this episode with a better understanding of how content can be connected and integrated into a cohesive unit. Join us for a reflective and practice-packed conversation.
Links:
Wildcat Workshop at Chester Arthur School
Philadelphia Writing Project
National Writing Project
Next Generation Science Storylines
Exploratorium Activities
PhET Interactive Simulations
StoryMap JS
Teaching with the Library of Congress Blog Post with Political Cartoon about Water Quality
Supporting Civically Engaged Argument Writing with Primary Sources: Monuments, Memorials, and Memory
Code.org
Micro:bits and MakeCode
Trey’s Personal Website
Other Makerspace and STEM Educator Episodes:
Defining STEM Education
The Experience Doesn't End in the Makerspace
Empowerment is the Why in Education
Intro Music :David Biedenbender
Other Music:
Brenton Davis- Lofi in the bank
Monday Hopes- walk on funky street
LesFm- LoFi Night Dreaming
Mandiran New Circles
Find us on social media:
Instagram: cmichcese
Facebook: cmich_cese
Ever wondered what a year in the life of another teacher looks like? Ever wonder what a year of doing project-based, interdisciplinary learning in a makerspace looks like? Trey Smith is a K - 8 digital literacy teacher in Philadelphia. He is sharing details on his units, approach to educational design, and reflections on where to go next. You'll leave this episode with a better understanding of how content can be connected and integrated into a cohesive unit. Join us for a reflective and practice-packed conversation.
Links:
Wildcat Workshop at Chester Arthur School
Philadelphia Writing Project
National Writing Project
Next Generation Science Storylines
Exploratorium Activities
PhET Interactive Simulations
StoryMap JS
Teaching with the Library of Congress Blog Post with Political Cartoon about Water Quality
Supporting Civically Engaged Argument Writing with Primary Sources: Monuments, Memorials, and Memory
Code.org
Micro:bits and MakeCode
Trey’s Personal Website
Other Makerspace and STEM Educator Episodes:
Defining STEM Education
The Experience Doesn't End in the Makerspace
Empowerment is the Why in Education
Intro Music :David Biedenbender
Other Music:
Brenton Davis- Lofi in the bank
Monday Hopes- walk on funky street
LesFm- LoFi Night Dreaming
Mandiran New Circles
Find us on social media:
Instagram: cmichcese
Facebook: cmich_cese
Today we're interviewing Trey Smith. I met Trey at a PBL workshop and Belle Isle. Before I met him in person, I knew that he was a makerspace teacher. I knew he was just starting out in this pretty new position. And I knew he was coming down to K eight from high school. And I had some assumptions about how that was going to go. So I was the first one to be absolutely blown away when Trey leads a seemingly simple activity with the teachers in this workshop. He just asks them to talk about what we noticed in the image on the screen. He put something up the projector. Now I will tell you that it was a historical political cartoon. He didn't even give us that much. But I watched as a roomful of teachers who just come off lunch who have had to fill busy days of workshops, transformed from slightly quiet slightly wary, into full on detectives, and I watched tre keep a curious facilitator stance just not an easy thing to do with teachers. And they watched him ask question after question after question. And then watched as he used questions to draw out information from teachers individually in small groups and in whole groups. He got us to discuss and debate and draw conclusions about the discovery of microorganisms in the Thames River. A topic that had you put a PowerPoint up with a zippy title and a lesson plan objective, who I would have been ready to secretly scroll on my phone to avoid discussing that all afternoon. But I loved every minute of it. And so did those teachers. I was so blown away by what Trey did something deceptively simple that was really complex and nuanced, and artfully done. So I asked to keep in touch and we have he's facilitated another PBL workshops with me. He's let me take a look at and ask questions about his unit plans and his lessons for his makerspace. You'll hear him referenced those conversations a little bit in this episode. And recently, in preparation for this podcast, we even traded audio recordings back and forth, because we were so excited to discuss student engagement and some of the questions he had about his practices this year. It has honestly been one of those professional correspondences in which I learned something new every single time we talk. So I asked him to talk to us in the podcast. And as I guessed, there is just way too much to put into a single episode and to do it justice. So this will be the first installment. And what you're going to get when I say it out loud sounds deceptively simple. You're going to get a description of several of Trey's units. But like everything Trey does, it becomes this woven, wonderful conversation about his thoughts behind his lessons, how he creates inter disciplinary units. And I'll let him share more. But I will say if you're looking for ideas about incorporating making and stem into your classroom, get a pencil ready. If you're wondering how to be more inter or multiple, multidisciplinary, get a pencil ready. If you're skeptical about how coding or laser printers can be relevant to you, because you teach history or physics or government. This episode is for you and all of your friends. So I've pared down a bit of Julie's in my conversation here, because you want to hear Trey over us anyway, I'll jump in a few times to offer some context and my own reflections in what is a jam packed episode full of specific ideas, big picture pedagogy, and some really thoughtful reflection and discussion. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dre just as much as I have. As always, there's a lot here. So make sure if you're looking for a transcript, you head on over to our website, which is linked in the show notes. You'll also see in the show notes links to many of the tools and resources that Trey brings up in this conversation. Here we go. Okay, so, on our podcast today, we're really excited to have someone who I know quite well and I'm going to let him introduce himself and tell us a little bit about his teaching story and how he got into the position he's in now.
Trey Smith:Great. Thanks so much for having me. I am a K to eight digital literacy teacher in Philadelphia public schools. What does that mean? That means I'm asked to teach by my district computational thinking and coding, use of digital tools I'm thinking about how do we search for information on the internet, and then also reflecting on computing in society. I'm fortunate that I was recruited by a principal who had a makerspace ready to go for me with a podcasting booth and 3d printers and lab tables and woodworking materials and also a family organization, a Friends of group, that's what our school calls it, that raises money to support our MakerSpace, which we call the Wildcat workshop. And so I had been teaching high school, prior to this biology, chemistry, I'm certified and have taught social studies at the middle school level for a year alongside teaching science, just to make the schedule work. And then during the pandemic, or the beginning of the pandemic, I should say, I started teaching computer science at my high school. I'm also certified to teach technology in Pennsylvania. And so I started teaching, coding, computing, computational thinking online via zoom. And I really loved it. And so that really prepared me to move into this new role, because I had some experience teaching science and social studies and computing. And I knew I wanted to do some interdisciplinary work or multidisciplinary work in my makerspace. And so yeah, this is really a dream job for me. I'm in year two, at at my new school, and I am gaming out the next you know, 10 to 15. Because I'm 20, who knows? I'm a millennial, so I guess I can't think that far ahead about my jobs. But yeah, I'm really excited to be at my school and to really try to bring to bear knowledge of a couple of different disciplines that I love and care a lot about, and try to integrate that into what is making your MC your Makerspace context.
Julie Cunningham:Yeah, you know, I have so many follow up questions already. Yeah, I actually knew that was gonna happen. So I don't even know where to begin in probably Trey, if you give us an example, maybe of an interdisciplinary project, or because I was going to ask just, I think sometimes Makerspace interdisciplinary projects, and even computational thinking don't mean the same thing to everybody who's listening. We'd like them to I think, but they don't always. So I don't know if it's easiest, or more interesting to give us an example or to or just tell us what your students are doing when they're engaged in those activities?
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah, that's, that's a great question. I think one of the things that I have tried to do is I see students about twice a week, so 284 students, twice a week, we have, you know, to kindergarten classes to first grade, and so forth. Pretty small class sizes, if you do the math. So I'm really fortunate there. And I have tried to develop a theme for each grade level, so that I can work with students on what I hope is a meaningful project for the entire year, but some many projects along the way. And then over the course of their time with me, through being at the school, we will have done a range of things with coding and making and some of it will be iterative. So let me let me give some examples. One would be in second grade, we think a lot about light and electricity. And we start with some explorations of like, can we see things when there is no light? We start to try to answer that question. And we use a storylines unit that I pulled from my life as a science teacher in my work with some folks who do storylines design. And so we're also testing, you know, which materials can light light through and, and so forth. And we're trying to make a part of our room dark, though, so we can do some light painting. And so I pulled a project from the exploratorium that I know about and students using closed sticks and, you know, cameras with open aperture and they're doing some light painting. And so that's sort of the problem, if you will, that we're trying to solve. But I've also couched the entire year of learning about lighting and trucks, light and electricity, and telling students that we're going to do some kind of invention at the end of the year, and I'm going to want you to bring to bear whatever you've learned about light and electricity. I want you to use that to try to solve a problem. So we're also with lightning electricity. We're today we were sketching out like, what's a light bulb look like a close and how does it work? And then we're moving into circuit simulations. And so moving into the electricity part, but we're still trying to play around with light itself. We're going to be brainstorming examples of lights in our community and how they communicate things or help us see things or help us do things. Then we can read a picture book about his name is escaping me, but I just the book came in this week. The gentleman who invented the traffic light, right, an African American man, and so we will learn about him we also Louis Latimer. who worked with Thomas Edison was a patent drawer, also African American male, he helped installs electric streetlights in Philadelphia, our first electric streetlights. And we have a Latimer street like down the street from our school. So we're like reading some picture books and learning about sort of the history of some of the technologies that influence our world. We have micro bits in second grade, where we're coding LEDs to try to solve some kind of problem or communicate a message. In this case, we're trying to communicate a message. And so I've had second graders tell me, one second grader told me that he sometimes just wants a sister to leave him alone. And he needs a way to communicate that with her. And so he coded stop, just comes up and says, stop another student, she said that her brother always gets the Doritos in the morning when they put the lunches together. And she doesn't think that's fair. And she wanted some kind of system to show the name of who's going to get the Doritos that day. And so I was like, oh, yeah, that's a great problem. Let me tell you about lists. And so we like, you know, create some lists and pull out a name or a word or something from them. And then other students realize that that solution for her project is actually a solution for a couple of other projects, potentially. So that gets them thinking, that's actually kind of not even our end product. But that's sort of our one of our test cases, or one of our experiences with playing around with tools, trying to think about some things in the world that we would love to address. And then, and we're also making servo motors move with the microbead and things like that. We're using Snap Circuits. We do a whole I don't know what its gonna look like this year, but we did four months of shadow puppets stories, so we're using different materials. And students are writing stories with our storyboards. I had that that could last the word storyboards, working on scripts, I'm going through students are still some students are really still emergent writers. So I'm helping write their stories out for them as they dictate to me or narrate to me what they want. And they had their ideas come so fast, and their pencils aren't moving as fast as their ideas, so I can help them with some of that, and then they're recording their scripts in the podcasting booth. They're filming, we have a partnership with the local NPR station. And so they provide a video cameras for us. So I've got video cameras around the room, and we have light stages up with lights, and then their shadow puppets and so that that project takes a lot of time, because then they're editing and iMovie, as well, which is sort of hitting my digital literacy standards in using digital tools for collaboration and creation. So and I'm also trying to hit literacy standards there were looking at, you know, fables and things from history to as mentor texts, if you will, to help us write our own stories. So there's a lot going on there. And yeah, at the end of the year, I'm like, Okay, so we've done all this stuff, like, what could you? What could you use? What could you put together to try to solve something? And one thing, I was just on a panel with some other folks, and we were talking about socio scientific problems. And, you know, they kind of were pushing me they're like, Okay, this is like, this is great kids are solving problems. Like, is there a way to bring in some extra like social dimensions in what you're doing? Not that I'm not doing enough? I don't think and so I think I am going to try to raise the question of like, do we? Do we need a an electrical or light solution to all our problems, right, like, if we already have enough with if we have some issues on the world where we don't have enough electricity in some communities? Do we need to automate flipping pancakes at home? Or can we just do that with our spatula, right? Like, is there because you know, a kid made a pancake flipper last year, and it was brilliant. It was awesome. We had so much fun doing it. Right? And so why not? Let's do it. But also like adding, I think, an extra layer on top of I think the question for me is like, the consequences of what we build, trying to think through that a little bit more. The same with like we could, we could look at the issues of migratory patterns being affected by city lights, or reflect reflect on city lights as being useful in Philadelphia for safety, but then also the safety of more than human, in our modern humans in our environment, we could think about them as well. And so just trying to add some more layers in but I feel really comfortable with my second grade unit, because I think there are a lot of cool sub projects that also are then helping us get to this final project. So I don't know if that's helpful to give you a sense. So now let's take a pause. And remember, Trey is talking about second grade, and he's talking about a unit that lasts an entire year. And he sees these students two times a week. He shared a quick recap of what a fee means to him, but I want to recap what I heard and then pull out some of the features that really make this multidisciplinary to me. So here I'm talking about a year long unit that's based on light and sound He starts this unit by sharing a question and Trey is great at what I like to call the meandering question. It leads to more questions. It can go in a lot of directions. It often requires research and can be revisited over time. It is not easily answerable. And for a unit to last year, you want some meaty questions. So starting with a meandering question, like Trey's leave space for all the directions that he then goes. He also talks about explorations or test cases later in the podcast, you're going to hear him say he likes to have an exploration with everything. To me, it means ways for students to learn by exploring the tools or the materials or the ideas, or by testing a theory. This is not a teacher telling them the answer it is them exploring or figuring it out for themselves. One of the ways to raise questions often meanders is to consider the students community. In the case of this unit, they're considering how light communicates and the purpose it serves their city. They're also looking at literature, texts to share about inventors and creators in the field of study, and mentor texts later, like fables that give students ideas instructor for when they're creating their own shadow puppet stories. Then we hear about the tools. The tools could be part of Trey's explorations when the students are figuring things out, or they could be part of an outcome or a project. From this theme. He mentioned Snap Circuits, shadow puppets iMovie and light stages. Now if you remember, Trey's main ask from his district was to teach computer science as part of the MakerSpace. So Trey also focuses on coding messages using little bits, and including digital citizen skills into the iMovie and movie editing portion of his unit. So those are the layers of tres teaching that he's built so far, for that one unit for this one class, class grade for this year. And through reflection and feedback from his peers, he's now going back to consider some social responsibility to help students see the impact of inventions.
Julie Cunningham:Well, I think you maybe make it the best job there is because I think lots of people would find it a struggle to make curriculum truly integrated. And also to use technology as a tool to drive the curriculum instead of to focus on you know, how to use the technology, right, but to use it as a tool for the, for your other goals. So I have so many questions. So I don't even know where to begin. So I how do the kids will several questions. But you mentioned you're not always an expert in the area that you're teaching. And for some people that scary. You mentioned YouTube or relying on outside sources, right? Somebody a student of yours who's gone for Netflix, or you're talking to a museum? How there can't be always that you know, everything there is to know about all these topics. So how do you get comfortable with allowing the students to drive some of the ways in which you go? Without? I don't know getting too worried that you don't know that the answer?
Trey Smith:I can't say we do it all? Well, right. I mean, today we were, we looked at light bulbs, I had one break. So that was a little bit of an issue had to deal with that, even though we had addressed safety. And then we were looking at PhET simulations and exploring and setting fires on FET, which is fun, the kids love to make the batteries. And so next time we have to talk about that right, like Okay, so what were you discovering what's actually going on here? Yeah, I don't know. I think I have some time to do all these things. But it is also complicated in that I like to have an exploratory phase A lot of these things, and then we try to unpack, we did. So I think the shadow puppet stories can be tighter this year. So I think I'll save some time. But also, we were three months in and I had a teacher that the teacher, the homeroom teacher said to me, she said, one of the students this morning said, we can't be late to Mr. Smith's class, because we've got to work on our shadow puppet stories. And so it tells me that they were still engaged. And it was so meaningful to them. So.
Ashley O'Neil:So that was an example of a second grade unit with Trey. And we did a little bit more talking. And then I asked him to share another example of a unit and what it might look like with older students.
Trey Smith:Yeah, and I'd say just another example, would be, this is a new one for me this year. Last year, we, in seventh grade did a project where we thought about monuments in our city and try to reflect on Are they as meaningful to us as they are to other people? Or what are these monuments trying to convey and who was memorialized? Or what ideas or what things? I didn't find that I pulled that project off as well as I could have even though it maybe that's like a whole podcast episode like me thinking about like, what went what could have gone better with the project, but at the end of the day, I was trying to have students reach Search, if they chose a topic about one group chose Louis Latimer actually, another group chose Ramadan as a topic, another group chose gun violence as a topic. So we had sort of had like a range of things. And then I asked students to think about where could this go in the city. And we had done some mapping, using a digital mapping tool of things they liked in the city. But one of them to think about, where would their monument or memorial sit in context, but the other things that might have happened, like, you know, Louis Latimer have friends in the city, did he know other people like who? What was what were the other connections? So we did some mapping, we coded a web page in HTML and CSS to kind of do a summary or sort of proposal web page. Like if we were trying to propose this monument, we got to send people to some information about it online, that's usually a good idea. So we made a simple webpage that had our map embedded in it, we created 3d models, 3d renders, and then printed them with a 3d printer. That was like one aspect of it. And then also, just doing the background research and trying to, you know, make a case.
Ashley O'Neil:So you might be thinking, these specific examples are great, but what are some big takeaways that I shouldn't be using, as I'm thinking about building my own interdisciplinary or my own makerspace, or my own stem unit with my students.
Trey Smith:But But I think telling you the story is useful and say, and trying to convey that I sort of knew that we're trying to do digital mapping, I know that we're trying to use the 3d printer and karvy, the CNC router, or the laser cutter this year, too. And I want to I want the students be able to design something like a prototype, with these tools. But also, we first started designing a mobile monument or memorial to ourselves, if we're going to make one try to do some identity work, reflect on who are we, as individuals as seventh graders, which was more and less fun for depending on the student? And then the, there was another component to the project. So the webpage, the map, the model, and then yeah, and the research, so I guess I did say all of it.
Ashley O'Neil:So as Trey is kind of building these units from the ground up, I hear him loosely considering the tools that he may use and some of the skills that students may learn through those tools. I hear him thinking about his community and asking kind of these broad questions. I hear I'm thinking about identity work with students and literature with students and ways that they can research. I have these outcomes I want students to do. And then I hear him doing a lot of brainstorming about how he can pull all of those things together in a cohesive way. Now, you'll hear me interrupt Trey and bring up a conversation that I remember the two of us having about this unit that I wanted him to share a little bit more about. You talked a little bit I've when we talked about this before, there were some components to the research about because some of those monuments were coming down in your city, right, like one of the things I love about the things that you share, is that they're really connected to place. And an accessible way for the students. So this thing was happening. Some of the monuments were coming down in Philly at that time, and you were able to talk about it with them and connect it right.
Trey Smith:Yes. So that was actually where we started was looking at this. We looked at an image of the King George statue being pulled out in New York in 1776. It was a lithograph and we were sort of noticing wondering, I didn't give them any context was like this is going to kickstart our whole year. Let's look at this image, right. And so they're analyzing and thinking about, like, what might this be? Oh, gosh, this is something that's happening now. Right? We have people trying to tear down statues now. And like, Oh, cool. Have we heard of any? Yeah, Christopher Columbus. Okay, cool. Let's like look up a YouTube video about that. And then we're looking at a YouTube video, and it's a reporter talking to people who there are men standing, primarily men standing around with baseball bats guarding the Columbus memorial in South Philadelphia. And then there are other people who are there with signs like saying we should take this down, and then the city boarded it up, and there was a big court case about like, Can this money be be removed? And so we did a nice little they say I say, like, to kind of get into this issue. What are some things that you've heard some people say in the news story? You know, they say this? And then what do you say in response? Right. And, you know, I have students, and this is not me telling students what to say this is students saying things like, once you said, you know, they say that they're going to tear down our history. And you know, student says, well, just because the monuments gone, doesn't mean the history is not there. Right? You have other students who are saying, and what other histories might be told, or could we tell? Right, so they're raising the themes that I want them to be thinking about the sort of questions because I'm coming at this from a literacy perspective, or it's probably other ways to talk about this, but our built environment is a text or collection of texts to be read right? then we can also rewrite them.
Ashley O'Neil:Okay, I'm gonna pause, are just gonna sit with this idea for a second. our built environment is a collection of texts that can be read and rewritten. Now this concept may be familiar to you, and it may not be. And you may also have heard of another complementary concept, this idea of Teaching with Primary Sources. So you may be wondering, why are we pausing to talk about literacy and primary sources, history and writing in what you may have thought of as a stem podcast? Well, for one, this project, and this concept is really interesting, and really, like interesting. And for to STEM is about the skills and the interconnection between disciplines. And what Trey is talking about here is building meaning by reading the environment around the students and allowing an authentic place to be the launching point for learning, really considering the plaques next to that fountain, and discussing the holes in the paragraph story that is written there. And asking questions that come up when you think about the holes in that story. So then you dig up the news articles from around that time of the monuments creation, and you look for information about the designer and the folks who wanted the statue in the first place. You asked about the state of the city at the time of the sculpture, as well as digging into the life and the history of the subjects in the monument. You notice who in your town has streets named after them? What story does that tell the location of the city center in relation to the first factory in your town? What story does that tell how the layout of the town is built? And what industries were there at the time of their building and the relationship between travel and food and the families of the workers that lived there? What story does that tell? having these conversations, and doing that research with students makes for a really rich and integrated experience. They're reading primary sources, meaning the original documents that talk about an event. So the birth certificates and the news article from that time, instead of a curated biography or textbook about it. They're likely writing questions and summaries, they're collaborating and discussing opinions and ideas. They're learning about architecture and the history of a place and why a bridge is built a certain way to accommodate a certain thing. They're learning about the quirky ways in which newspapers were numbered and delivered. And they're learning how to read maps. And then they're also creating and building and making in a sense that may feel more familiar like a stem piece. I love that tree is a STEM teacher who is a part of the National Writing Project, this way of adding literacy moves past that surface level attempt to connect an engineering activity to a story, immerses students in a concept fully and allows them to then move around and learn tools to satisfy their own questions. And all the while they're curating. And they're building and they're making, okay, back to tray.
Trey Smith:And so think of a monuments and memorials as things to be read, potentially rewritten. And I've been doing that having that discussion and conversation with colleagues in the Philadelphia writing project and the National Writing Project. So, you know, I'm not pulling, I'm not making all this up, either. I'm drawing from really smart folks who have been doing this work. And then I, I think, Okay, I think this connects in a makerspace context. So with seventh grade this year, though, I just didn't, I don't think I got the buy in about monuments I did from some students, but I just didn't feel the overall buy in. And I don't know if I just didn't do enough to, you know, make the project. Feel like meaningful, right, like an outside partner could have helped. There's a new Marian Anderson statue going up item, I tried to invite someone to come talk to us about, like, What's that process like to get a new statue proposed and things like that. And I've never really like pulled that off. And so I think having an outside partner would have been useful in kind of helping us see what this process is like. I also didn't share examples of students getting historical markers put up. But those are there examples in Philadelphia, of students who have gotten historical markers erected. And I think that's a really exciting and empowering story. Just didn't have time to tell it right or introduced to the students, or I didn't make the time. And so I think that might have affected the project.
Ashley O'Neil:So tres reflection on this project recognizes the need to balance her out relevance with history. Students need to identify with the things that are happening. So he wants to include some modern examples of students, children, his students age who have have done something about this who have have made their mark on history. So in the seventh grade unit this year, he's trying a different approach.
Trey Smith:This year, we're doing ancient technologies in seventh grade and trying to create a museum exhibit, which I've talked to you about some actually, and there are a lot of different layers to this, but some of the big components are using 3d printer. We have a 3d scanner this year as well. Our laser cutter and so forth. So like, you know, if we learn about hieroglyphics, like could we make our own hieroglyphs? Like about ourselves? Right? Can we design our own, but then we're doing that in service of we know we're going to design some exhibits on the road. And so maybe, well, one of the reasons we might think about laser cutting a hieroglyph for 3d printing it is because the actual ones that we might show in a museum, the communities that they're from might want them right, we are museum might not be able to have them. Because we're in America. Right? And so that's a question a social question we're gonna be asking is what happens when communities, particularly those outside of the West, or even native communities in the US, where they want artifacts back that Western museums, American museums, European museums have, and we know that those are there stories, the Guinean bronzes, I think, Germany just gave back a bunch. There are 100 badeen, bronzes in the University of Pennsylvania Museum here in Philadelphia, which is nuts to me, right, like 100 of them these contested artifacts. And I think they're like 500, of the British 600 of the British Museum. But there are 100 here in Philadelphia. And that's a, you know, a thing to think about right to really reflect on. And I think I only saw a couple, I've been over there. And there are only a couple that are displayed even. So what happens when communities want these back so we can do argumentation, writing research, that's going to be part of it sort of an op ed project, but also trying to design our exhibits, but then try to be respectful or responsive to thinking about how could digital tools help us do this in a way that is respectful and responsible and ethical, but also teaches people. And so we've done our 3d design or Tinkercad work right now, we designed some obelisks, which I realized was a really great project to start off with because a they could they could make them they could put their names and different things in the obelisk. Besides, I could personalize them. And we could also like learn about like, where those are from, then we looked at pyramids as well, because pyramids are easy to build. But like getting someone to build a stepped pyramid, like once we might find in Mexico, for instance. Like getting students to design those things. But like the, what I really liked about this project, unlike the one last year kind of just said, go do anything was that to make an obelisk you have to do like a sort of stretched out pyramid. Not that anyone who's hearing the audio can see my hands, but I'm moving my hands here as stretched out vertically pyramid, you have to cut off the top right, we have to know how to do that in Tinkercad. And then you put it like a another pyramid on top so and then we can embed text in it. So I I realized that and asking students to design this that I'm really actually helping teach some particular skills with Tinkercad. And then we also have these like personalized artifacts that are connected, I think to what we're studying. So we're still using 3d printer, we'll still make a webpage that explains our exhibit to someone will still do some mapping. Right now, I've been building my own map, to kind of point out the places we are learning about around the globe, I think there are additional areas for additional ways for students to connect their identities to this and that we're looking at cultures around the world. So if I have a US classroom with students from diverse backgrounds, then, you know, they might select areas that they want to know more about or feel connected to in some way. And then the other layer that we're going to be thinking about, we had done some discussion in web design, about Universal Design in in on the web front. But now we can bring that to the museum front. And I think I don't know that I have the time to do everything I need to do here. So I have to be really mindful. But I think that's a really important and exciting dimension to this work. And so, you know, what's our 3d printer doing in terms of helping us make this exhibit? Accessible, right? What's our laser cutter doing? What's our website doing? What's our, our map doing? Can we make this accessible? And what kind of partners can we bring in? So certainly a museum partner is I've reached out to someone who's still working on that front, but then also, members of disability communities that could be potential clients or partners haven't really worked all that out.
Ashley O'Neil:I'm just going to interject here and say that before you start creating a UDL component to your classroom unit, I highly recommend that you learn more about UDL or Universal Design for Learning. And I recommend following some disability advocates on social media platforms. I'm talking about disabled adults and teens who are sharing their own experiences and their own preferences. Not someone else speaking on Half of a person or community, if you're interested in learning more here, send us a message. We're going to jump back into a conversation with Trey. And I missed it on the recording. But Julie asks Trey, how he balances all of these different things, the preps, the units, the questions, the student projects, all of it.
Trey Smith:So it's a challenge for me because I have nine different themes, right, where I'm trying to do this, and I'm trying to build some of this while the planes flying. And so it doesn't mean I do it well, all the time. But I think I'm trying to pull from existing projects that I'm familiar with are like resources, I'm familiar with approaches that I felt really comfortable with, and then just kind of put it out there to students. And let's, and I try to see what they're taking up. And then, you know, if things don't, things aren't going super well, then I'll just I can change, you know, direction a little bit. Yeah, anyway, I think I have a dream job, right? I really do. Because I just I get to take up things that I'm interested in. And I love movies. I love thinking about cinema. But I don't know a ton about it. So I want you to, but I am excited about the seventh grade project. And I'm always excited about second grade. And, you know, we do plants and pollinators in third grade, we do textiles and patterns. In fourth grade we do. We're doing space in fifth grade this year. Sixth grade is all cinematography and movies. So we'll design movie posters we are working on I just set up one today, we were working on a track and a dolly to learn how to like do dolly shots, I bought gimbals. We're going to have cranes. But I talked to students today is like why am I doing all this with you? Because you people are trying to persuade you with media all the time. And so when we learn about zooms today versus dolly shots, and we think about what a Zune does, it makes you feel a certain kind of way. So if we can break down how we feel when we watch media, and also understand how someone did it, we can understand if someone's trying to manipulate us or if manipulation is not always a good or bad thing necessarily, right, but just recognize that were people are persuading us. So like with that, but then we're gonna build mobile apps. code.org is so useful. I use it all the time for so many things. code.org movie recommender app is like one of their projects. So we can do that in App Lab with JavaScript. And then we can design movie posters and Adobe Express. For our movies that we're making. We're doing stop motion movies right now, with Lego characters and clay and everything. So this is sort of where I am, oh, eighth grade, I don't say this. We build games that are inspired by nature. So we build board games. And then we also we're going to design games for our phone, again, in Game Lab on code.org in JavaScript, and those are for youth who go to the Heinz Wildlife Refuge. It's an urban wildlife refuge here in Philadelphia. And it's for them in the summer. So we've taken a field trip there already, with the eighth grade students, they went at the end of last year to set up this project. And then we've met the park rangers and the park rangers are sort of our clients along with like, the other young people that we'd imagine. So yeah, that's where I am. And I, again, like I said, I think I have one of the best jobs there is.
Ashley O'Neil:I'm always amazed at how open and curious he stays when he's framing things for his students. And when he's framing conversations for his own teaching, if I could take one thing back with me from my conversations with Trey, it would be to keep and build this open language communication in my own teaching so that everything I posed to students had this curious, genuine questioning nature about it, because I think that's part of what makes his me meandering questions work so well. We'll be sharing more of our conversation with Trey on another episode, I recommend that in the meantime, you check out the links in the show notes, we shared a lot of the tools and resources recommended there. One final thought on makerspaces and maker learning. A lot of times we get asked in our space to share what's maker centered learning, what's the maker space, what STEM education, and it gets tricky. You can talk to five different educators and you'll hear some overlap and some through lines. And then you'll hear some things that are really unique to that space, or that individual or that region. Like most things, it doesn't all mean the same things. And it really can't. It is wonderful to see makerspaces that are customized or become specific to the interests and skill sets of the educators in that space. That specific to the tools that are available, and specific to the goals and the objectives of the educational space and the ages of the students. Over the years. Our center has curated our own definition and practices in our MakerSpace and that definition is constantly evolving as we You'll learn about and learn from the practices and experiences of others. Every time we listen to a teacher's experience we grow and we're grateful for getting to learn from Trey this week. If you're interested in learning more with us, you can always reach out at our email C E S, E, at CMI C h.edu. You can also hear conversations that we've had with other stem and Makerspace educators and previous episodes. I've linked some of them in the show notes as well. Teach wonder is brought to you by the Center for Excellence in STEM education. Thanks for listening