Integrated Learning Experiences for K-12
June 5, 2018
Director’s Take: Integrated Learning Experiences for K-12
By June, many Universities have completed the academic year, but at Drexel we’re not done yet. Our Commencement is mid-June, but this has a nice side effect of coinciding with local K-12 school calendars, enabling us to extend our partnerships until the end of their terms.
We’ve always emphasized K-12 outreach because it’s an opportunity to provide leading edge content in areas of interest (music technology, robotics, game development) that students may not have access to through school. It’s also a great opportunity for our Drexel graduate and undergraduate researchers to develop their communication skills for a broader audience through teaching and mentoring younger students.
Through these programs, we’ve become more and more confident that the ExCITe Center’s approach of transdisciplinary integrative hands-on learning is effective not only for higher ed, but at all levels of education. Many initiatives incorporate project-based learning, but ours differ in their breadth of disciplinary integration. Students with an initial interest in robotics may end up working with smart fabrics. Others working on musical instruments may find their way into microcontrollers and electronics. And those passionate about video games learn the importance of both coding and storytelling.
This year, in addition to summer camp and week-long externships, we’ve created a number of long-term experiences for K-12 students at ExCITe during the academic year. Earlier in this podcast we heard from some of our high school students involved in long-term internships exploring engineering, computing, robotics, digital media, and civic engagement. We developed a 9-week music and making short course for students at SLA-MS as an introduction to robotics and coding. And there’s our group of young podcasters, also from SLA-MS, learning to explore and express themselves through this medium.
These programs and partnerships are just a few examples of new approaches to learning in our region. We hope they form pieces of a local education innovation cluster, to encourage schools, organizations, and higher education institutions to work collaboratively to pursue such efforts. That’s a topic of growing interest regionally and nationally that we’ll cover in greater detail in next month’s podcast.