Project-based STEM: Driving The Extra Mile

After my interview with middle school STEM teacher Joel Naatus, I came to a stark realization. There exists a hole in the current online STEM curricula. It’s not the unsuspecting teenager who forgot to unmute his Zoom call, or the student watching Tik Toks on a separate tab.

Rather, it was the lack of hands-on activities coupled with a motivation gap due to online learning that Joel and others found to be most troublesome.

Joel and his fellow teachers have to take extreme measures to distribute lab and project materials to their students. He detailed, for instance, the work that goes into running an underwater robotics team while the teammates can only work on their own. To distribute the necessary supplies, teachers in charge of the team brought soldering supplies directly to the home of a girl on the team.

“So she’s going to start working at home, doing all the soldering remotely… Mechanical learning and your physical dexterity and things like that, it goes hand and hand with the science… [And] we can help her online because we can just film what she’s supposed to do and then potentially troubleshoot with her.”

The underwater robotics team, however, is a single case effort — it’s simply not feasible to do the same with every student. Joel still finds it hard to integrate the project-based learning lessons he finds so powerful in the STEM classroom.

When asked what resources he’d want to provide his students given all the money and power in the world, he sits back, shrugs, and smiles. He shoots out a couple ideas: an “outdoor makerspace,” a “crazy boat with a builder space on it,” or maybe a “big, giant semi-truck with a mobile lab.” Whichever one his imagination settles on, it’s obvious that he cares not about the grass, sails, or wheels. He cares most about giving his students a safe space to do hands-on STEM work.

Yet, Joel also ponders on whether or not these resources would be well-received by all of his students. When asked about the motivation levels of his students compared to his in-person past experiences, Joel takes a moment before answering.

“The overachievers actually have more time to pursue their independent projects, pursue their interests. For the ones that are… struggling, it just sort of piles up on them. It’s interesting. Our really advanced students seem to have extra time to work on their passions. For the ones who are less interested, it sort of seems like they do less and less. It’s very interesting…It’s kind of like 10% great, and then the other 90% they really struggle to keep up with all the work.”

Joel’s observations highlight the underlying issues of online high school STEM learning. While “overachievers” are given a liberating freedom to explore and enrich, the unfortunate yet hardly unexpected reality is that most students use bedroom schools and Zoom classrooms as escapes from doing their otherwise mandatory homework. Compounded with the lack of engaging, formative hands-on work that otherwise would’ve supplemented necessary theoretical and practice exercises, online STEM classes have expanded the motivation gap between high achieving students and those looking to just get by.

Joel, like countless other teachers across the nation, continues to struggle to give his students the best STEM learning experience given the circumstances. While overloaded with inconveniences and unprecedented problems, he undoubtedly loves his students and will do anything to help them. Before exiting the Zoom call, Joel couldn’t help but interrupt me and point to his Zoom background with a glint in his eyes: a group of his students on a New York coastline, flanked by the Statue of Liberty. Sure, he may struggle to distribute physical materials. Of course, he experienced a motivation change during his transition from in-person to online. Yet, despite all of this, he can’t help but brag just a little bit about his students’ accomplishments and abilities whenever he can.

In the meanwhile, he stays tirelessly committed to offering lab materials and valuable learning opportunities to his students in any ways possible — even if that means driving door-to-door on occasion.