Simple materials can teach STEM principles and help students engage with learning.
Nicole Fenty, associate professor and chair of the Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership Department at the College of Community and Public Affairs at Binghamton University, discusses several examples.
Faculty Bio:
Nicole Fenty joined the Department of Teaching, Learning, & Education Leadership as an assistant professor in 2012. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of South Florida and her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Florida. She has worked as a special education teacher in elementary schools in the state of Florida.
Transcript:
STEM education has become a priority for students over the last decade, with concepts such as coding and problem solving now viewed as important across many career pathways. A central area of focus for me is how these concepts can be taught in ways that young learners can meaningfully understand. To explore this, I worked with two students from our doctoral and undergraduate education minor programs respectively, Leyli Yeganeh and Vanessa Uhteg, to examine how early coding concepts could be integrated into classroom literacy instruction.
We partnered with two preschool teachers to work with four of their students who were struggling to sequence stories. Because sequencing is a foundational skill in both literacy and coding, we designed an instructional activity using the familiar nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill.”
The activities we used were simple and involved hands-on materials - a poster board divided into a grid with tape, picture cards representing four parts of the story, and directional arrows. These tools allowed students to place events in order while also learning basic coding vocabulary such as “grid,” “arrow,” and “forward.”
Across three weeks of instruction, students practiced organizing story events using these materials while becoming more comfortable with using coding terms, using the grid effectively, and sequencing pictures correctly. After three lessons, all students were using the materials as intended, applying coding vocabulary, and accurately sequencing the full story.
These results highlight an important point about early STEM learning. While digital technological tools are often emphasized, it is the underlying concepts that matter most. When those concepts are embedded in familiar literacy activities, such as storytelling, students are better able to engage with and understand them.
Simple, low-tech materials that incorporate meaningful narratives can provide young learners with accessible connections to both literacy and early coding.
Read More:
[Wiley] - Sequencing Nursery Rhymes through Early Coding in Preschool Settings
