Poster: Engineering Social Processes in a 5th Grade STEM Unit

By the end of 5th grade, students should have "used tools and materials to design and build a device that uses light to solve the problem of communicating over a distance" (Next Generation Science Standard (NGSS) performance expectation: 1-PS4-4). Since the NGSS have not been adopted in New York State, 5th grade students have not had an opportunity to meet this expectation. In the 2015 - 2016 academic year, Buffalo State teacher candidates and their science methods professor designed a STEM unit for 5th graders that focused on that performance expectation. The STEM unit was co-taught by the science methods professor and 5th grade teacher at one of Buffalo State College’s Professional Development School. Fifth grade students used "squishy circuits" (Johnson & Thomas, 2010), ideas from the Navajo Code Talkers and a modified ASCII code to communicate with each other using light. Students were able to encode, send, receive and decode a message over a distance with light during their initial investigation, but were not able to communicate only with light. In order for the students to eliminate talking, they discovered that they had to engineer social processes with the squishy circuits. This poster describes their solution.