Action Time for the STEAM Committee
The Stand up Meeting
Our meeting this week started with Andrea Flemate and the STEAM committee members having a stand up meeting to go over what they did since last week. Not much happened around refining the current project ideas proposed by the committee.
The Product Owner Role
In Scrum, a Product Owner is responsible for defining what should be worked on and based on which priority.
Borrowing from eduScrum, teachers assume the role of Product Owner in our committee as well. This allows the teacher to align the committee work (and corresponding lessons to the class) to the regular classwork planned for the students.
So as the Product Owner, Andrea decided some of the projects brought up were not a good fit:
- Lantern origami: was previously covered in class (in previous year).
- Let’s get shaking: will be covered in an upcoming visit by a Colorado University team.
Concepts Come To Life
As the committee discusses how to select their first project, the idea of a survey and dot voting come into play, as tools to gather feedback from their classmates.
After some deliberation, the committee decided to “yay”/”nay” the project proposals on the table. This way their classmates would pick from the project ideas the committee would like to explore. And in true Agile fashion, the committee decided to roman vote on each one of the project ideas. How cool is that?!
Through roman voting the committee decided that they would not move forward The art & math around us project and was left with three projects:
Classroom Activity: Dot Voting Anyone?
The dot voting on the three project was conducted by printing out each of the project descriptions and taping them to a board and providing a brief explanation about each project.
Each student was given two dots to vote on the projects during their lunch break, and instructed to place their dots e any one of the three projects.
The final tally was:
- Orienteering: 13 dots
- Electronic storytelling: 18 dots
- Patchwork of knowledge: 25 dots
Now with the input from their classmates, the committee and teachers decided to start with the Electronic Storytelling project.
Observations
It was great to see how the committee members seamlessly incorporated previously introduced Scrum concepts (Scrum board, roman voting, dot voting) into their group interaction:
- Throughout the discussion action items were promptly written down in post-it notes and immediately placed in the Scrum board by the students.
- Picking up roman voting as a way to reach consensus within the committee.
- Discussing how many dots each classmate should be given to vote with for the three remaining project ideas.
Next Steps
- Committee/teachers to decide which project to work on.
- Committee to get started on the selected project.
- Identify target dates for the next 3 lessons (currently targeting Dec, Jan, Feb). Andrea will take ownership of these items.
- For next meeting, clarify the team dynamic (free to speak up right away when things are not working) and bring up the maker space as an ongoing project.
