Selecting Science and Engineering Activities
One of the goals of professional development is to acquaint activity leaders with a set of science activities they can successfully implement in their programs. More importantly, a professional development program should also help activity leaders reflect on their current practices, adopt new pedagogical practices, and move toward implementing science activities in the spirit of becoming more professional practitioners. By using high-quality published science materials as a way to introduce and discuss basic pedagogical practices, you can address both of these goals. These types of hands-on instructional materials often encourage students to come up with their own questions or problems, and to find or design ways to answer them. This ensures that while professional development participants are actively involved in discovery-based activities, they take on the dual roles of learning about the instructional materials and learning about science for themselves. In general, the science activities for children highlighted in this guide are structured as follows: they begin with an introduction, followed by engaging children in a hands-on exploration or challenge and then reporting their discoveries, and conclude with children making sense of their discoveries. As much as possible, the presenter should model the pedagogical practices that will be the focus of discussion and reflection. In this manner, modeling can be a means to illustrate some practical implementation issues in the context of a set of specific science activities.
Ideally, if you are presenting these activities in a workshop, you should have some prior experience leading the activities with children. This will best prepare you to anticipate implementation issues and to provide a clear picture of how to use the activities with children. We suggest obtaining the instructional materials well ahead of the workshop, and practicing some or all of the activities on your own, or with children.
When selecting a set of science activities to present as a model for implementation, it is important to consider both practical and professional development issues. The following are some criteria found to be useful for selection:
Practical Considerations
The activities:
- are highly engaging for both the intended youth audience and the adult participants.
- use simple, inexpensive, and easily attainable materials.
- address interesting, meaningful, and age-appropriate topics in science or engineering.
- provide foundational experiences in science and engineering that help children build insight into content related to national standards.
- are designed to develop the skills of critical thinking and problem solving.
- are intended for use by presenters with little formal experience teaching science or engineering.
Pedagogical Considerations
- The activities provide opportunities to model and discuss a range of pedagogical practices.
- At least some of the activities should be done during the session in a thorough manner so that participants have an opportunity to get a “real feel” for the project.
- The project (set of activities, explorations, or design challenges) is representative of other kinds of science activities, so that it can act as a model for learning about implementing discovery-based activities in general.
Resources for Science and Engineering Activities
There are now a wide variety of published science activities and kits that have been designed for out-of school or informal learning environments. These are of varying quality and practicality. To get a sense of what is available and their relative usefulness for your setting, we have included the following links. Also see Workshop Tools to access the particular LHS and EDC activities used in our exemplars for professional development.
Consumer’s Guide to Afterschool Science Resources
SEDL Afterschool Training Toolkit
Exploratorium Hands-on Activities
TERC Afterschool and Informal Learning