Big things are a-bubblin’ at Bowie Elementary School for the fall. But in this case, these bubbles are real.
Kindergarten through second grade at Bowie on May 7 topped off a nine-week study unit with a soapy showcase held for parents and then the next day for animals visiting from the Abilene Zoo.
“Today we had our STEM Bubble Project Showcase. Each classroom completed a STEM unit on bubble wands,” said Principal Janaye Wideman. “Their task was to explore bubble wands, their design, their purpose, how they make bubbles, what the best design is for the different kinds of bubbles you can make.”
STEM — the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Science — was tied into this project for a purpose. More on that in a moment.
Bubble fans
Longtime readers will remember that soap bubble-making was my extracurricular activity for several years at the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival while I was focused solely on stories outside of Abilene.
Near and dear to me as it was, I eventually handed that task over to others when I started covering the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival in more recent years.
But I remember the exquisite joy in a child’s face when they saw those bubbles getting bigger by the moment. You could see the same joy in these Bowie students as the bubbles they created with their handmade wands took flight.
“So our students have spent nine weeks studying this. They’ve done a lesson a week, and throughout their exploration they have learned about all different structures, types of bubbles, shapes of bubbles,” Wideman said. “Each part of the process is just going through and thinking about, ‘What am I trying to accomplish?'”
On the heels of such a question, the student then asks how they accomplish it? That’s followed by then making a plan, executing it and then improving upon that.
Science!
Pretty heady stuff for a kindergartner or even a second-grader, but when a mind is focused, its abilities can be endless.
“So they had a lot of fun, they got to play with bubbles. But the ultimate goal was to build knowledge in the engineering design process,” Wideman said.
That’s important because big changes are on the horizon for Bowie, as well as Purcell Elementary School. In the fall, both will be designated STEM campuses at the elementary school level. On May 11, the Abilene ISD Board of Trustees voted unanimously to change the schools’ names to Bowie STEM Academy and Purcell STEM Academy.
“We will have a lot more activities like this, more exposure to STEM fields for our students, and they’ll have a lot more experiences tied to STEM,” Wideman said. “We’re really excited about that.”
Not the destination, but the journey
Perhaps you’re wondering about the real-world application in all of this. Quite simply, it’s not the product here that matters so much as the process that it took to make it.
The focus on designing something in which the students are highly motivated to work properly only ensures the lessons learned getting to that point stick. Wideman said those tools and their mindset can serve them in countless ways in the future.
“They learned a lot about structure and how they can use that to engineer what their vision is, for their bubble wand,” Wideman explained.
The first order was a breakdown on what a wand is and what works best.
“When you look at the design of a bubble wand, you look at what kind of material are you using, how long is it, how wide is it, where you put the the bubble solution on,” she said. “They have to look at all of those pieces of it in order to know if it’s going to be a good, sturdy bubble wand.”
Life lessons taught early
Contrary to popular sentiment, failure is an option. But don’t call it a deterrent, it’s just part of the lesson.
“I think they enjoyed just learning how we use failure as a part of success,” Wideman said. “They might not have enjoyed that the whole way, but that was one lesson they learned they had to work through.”
Failure allowed for experimentation, which allowed for creativity, which then sometimes still resulted in a different kind of failure but not always. Their eventual triumphs were seen in every one of their faces.
“I hope they take away that failure is a part of our success, no matter what we’re doing, and I hope they take away that they can achieve hard things,” Wideman said. “That’s so applicable to every part of life.”
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Budding STEM minds prepare for the future through bubble wands
Reporting by Ronald W. Erdrich, Abilene Reporter-News / Abilene Reporter-News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
