Get Started with STEAM Classroom
Get Started with STEAM Classroom
Envision how students engage in a creative learning process building projects meaningful to them.
The Strawbees team is happy to welcome you to your new STEAM Classroom experience. We are excited to work together in getting you acclimated with Strawbees Classroom.
As teachers, you teach a variety of areas, such as knowledge, how to navigate social-emotional moments, and skills. You teach children reading and writing comprehension. Introduce them to history and how to draw conclusions from evidence after conducting an experiment. While you help them learn the value of teamwork and perseverance. Contributes to shaping young minds and helping them become critical thinkers, complex problem solvers and creators. But how does one go about teaching these?
Teaching children how to think for themselves is not easy, but it is necessary if we want our children to create the change the world needs. In this article, we present how we give you the resources to teach children how to think creatively, critically and solve problems like inventors do.
Creative Learning
Strawbees are not only a tool or about making things, it’s also the environment in which they are made. We want to create a learning environment that helps children engage in projects that reflect their ideas and how they see the world.
Inspired by the work at Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT Media Lab and Strawbees resources and materials are for helping teachers to facilitate situations where students can engage in creative thinking. Children continuously iterate their projects as they travel through the Creative Learning Spiral.
[1] Kindergarten learning approach for student projects to iterate through the Creative Learning Spiralcoined by Mitch Resnick of Lifelong Kindergarten.
A classroom with Strawbees transforms into a dynamic and collaborative playground with opportunities for students to interact, experiment, and create overlapping projects. In this imaginative space of making and playing, children refine their creative thinking while building projects they care about. As they build, their process is reflected as the Creative Learning Spiral.
A pair makes a wearable idea catching machine in Sara Ebert's library.
Kids nested away in their domes in Mr. Raber's makerspace.
With just a handful of connectors and a few straws or cardboard, there is plenty that can be built from a simple shape to compound machines. Use computers, hands, imagination. Recycle or upcycle anything they can get their hands on. Problems may be endless, but possibilities are infinite. Whether it’s an idea for an automatic food dispenser for your pet or to understand why it’s impossible to make a regular polygon out of regular hexagons, there is a tangible experience of ideation through figuring out complex and sometimes abstract ideas. If children dream it, they can build it.
Strawbees are a connector in more ways than one. We believe in developing creative confidence for your students to make sense of the world and solve new problems. It's important to know how to build, explore, test, and experiment because breakthroughs don't just happen. Learning by trying is the future.
Young students mapping out an urban city layout, fulfilling the needs of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in Rome, Italy led by Paola Mattioli.
Bridge designs have to carry loads over molten lava in Brian Jones' class taken place in California.
A student group designs a shovel and bridge/ladder with a trap for a daring escape from a secret tunnel in Meaghan Creamer's makerspace.