Oak Point students explore STEM subjects during Bakken Museum classroom visits

Hushed (and not so hushed) questions floated around Samantha Curtiss’s second-grade classroom at Oak Point Elementary as students wondered about a woman from the Bakken Museum who had just walked through the door with a large rolling bag. “We’re going to act as scientists today!” she said with a smile. Introducing herself as Wendy, she directed the Eagles’ attention to a small whiteboard she’d brought in her bag. Four words on the board laid out the work that scientists did each day: Wonder, Try, Discover and Share. “We’re going to do a lot of trying today,” she said excitedly.

It was a cold Wednesday morning, right in the middle of a week full of Bakken Museum visits to Oak Point. Instructors from the interactive science museum in Minneapolis were scheduled to visit each K-5 classroom over the course of a week in January, offering hands-on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) projects that each student would have the chance to participate in. Principal Theresa Marty and Associate Principal Oscar Andrade Lara had spent several busy nights serving food at the Eden Prairie Culver’s to raise money for the school’s PTO. Now, that money was creating an exciting hands-on learning opportunity by bringing the Bakken right to Oak Point.

“Do you want to meet my friend?” Wendy asked the class with a sly smile. From her bag, she pulled out a bee puppet: Bobby. Bobby had a problem. He had just made new friends, but all of his friends were bee robots! How could they communicate when Bobby only spoke English and the bee-bots only spoke in code? The second graders needed to tackle the challenge.

Around the classroom, Wendy had placed a number of plastic mats that contained pictures of a house, a flower and a beehive. Students broke into small groups, selected a mat and were tasked with exploring a bee-bot. The bee-bots — small, mechanical bees on wheels — had a series of buttons on their backs, each giving a different instruction for how the bee should move. Each group set off trying to understand the button commands. Bee-bots moved forward, backward, turned in circles and traveled across the room as the second graders laughed. “Ms. Curtiss, I figured it out!” exclaimed August Hansen, who was working from the classroom floor with his group. Curtiss walked over to see what he’d discovered. “You have to press ‘X’ to clear it,” he said confidently, explaining that the bee-bot would only forget a string of movement instructions after pressing X. His groupmates Aarav Gund and Allira Daravong smiled as their bee-bot moved about according to the buttons August pushed. They’d uncovered something new.

“[Exploration] allows students to find answers or seek out information, rather than just be told,” Curtiss explained, looking out over her classroom as smiles and laughs filled the space. “It gives them the freedom to interact with materials in a different way.” Across the room, students were beginning to discover how to interact with the bee-bots — and as they did, Wendy later explained, they were also learning to write code. The Eagles’ next challenge, now that they’d learned how the bee-bots moved? Program them to move from the hive to the flower to the house, all in one long string of button presses. “Are you ready for this big challenge?” she asked the class. They were.

Students returned to their mats and quickly had their bee-bots moving just as they told them to. But instead of just stopping there, the second graders began creating new challenges for themselves. Get it to move to an even further point! Make it turn in circles! The only limit to their exploration with the bee-bot was how long the Bakken Museum visit lasted.

When the students gathered one final time before Wendy was off to the next classroom, they shared what they’d learned — the final step in any scientific exploration. Wendy summed it up: “Code is all around us.” And ultimately, the lesson taught something much deeper: the power of wondering, trying and discovering.