Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Great STEM Rube Goldberg Video – Girls Love Making Stuff!

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.

máquina rube goldberg. by medea_material, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  medea_material 

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