Take a couple minutes and watch the now-viral video, “GoldieBlox, Rube Goldberg, & Beastie Boys “Princess Machine” (a concert for little girls).” It’s a delightful Rube Goldberg project, but it makes a larger point about how engineering and MAKING isn’t just for boys! Girls love making engineering projects too!
Thanks to Chris Simon, STEM Coordinator for the Girl Scouts of Western Oklahoma, for sharing the MSN article, “Engineering kits for girls + Beastie Boys tune = best toy ad ever,” which featured the video.
Showing videos like this to our students and children is a good and valuable thing to do, but we need to change what we value in schools to seriously address STEM equity issues. As Papert and Turkle observed in 1991, we need “epistemological pluralism” in our schools.
Our central thesis is that equal access to even the most basic elements of computation requires an epistemological pluralism, accepting the validity of multiple ways of knowing and thinking. (Turkle & Papert, 1991)
Read more in “Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom” by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary S. Stager.
Additional STEM resources are available on stem.wesfryer.com. Follow my 4th & 5th grader STEM students on Twitter @iesSTEM.
Technorati Tags: video, women, youtube, stem, girls, equity, make, making, engineering, rube, goldberg, viral
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On this day..
- Things I Learned Traveling to Egypt - 2017
- STEMseeds is BACK on Saturday - Join us! - 2014
- Parody Fest: Goodnight Goon, Dune, Forest Moon, iPad, Democracy & More - 2012
- Lessons Learned using VoiceThread for iPad - 2011
- Embedding Flash Audio on WordPress.com with an iPad - 2011
- You Could Only Make this Video on a Mobile Phone - 2011
- Speech Tournament Naps, iPod Policies, Laptop Lockdowns and Student Inspiration #cwf2010 - 2010
- Arne Duncan Says Graduate Degrees for Teachers are Worthless - 2010
- The value of routinely engaging in creative expression - 2010
- Learn About Google Apps and Geo-Apps Dec 14 & 15, 2010 in Oklahoma City - 2010
