Category: Documentaries

For the last few weeks, I have been volunteering for STEAM Train, a program that my school organized to help middle school students think of creative ways to solve world problems. Some examples of these problems can be making useful things out of ocean plastic and strengthening existing materials. The high school volunteers are supposed to guide the students so that they know what is achievable and what is too out of their reach at the moment to get done. Some of the projects that I helped out with was making materials like Kevlar stronger, making edible water bottles easier to be carried around, and using immortal jellyfish to achieve human immortality. Even though things like these probably already exist, they wanted to improve on them and do the research for it to be possible to happen, even though they probably won’t be able to. I chose to volunteer here because I thought it would be fun to help younger students with STEAM-related projects. However, because of the pandemic going on, I was skeptical about being involved in this as I don’t know whether learning this kind of thing over ZOOM is actually helpful to them. From my experience in Online school, the classes like English, History, and French are easy to learn online because of the out of classwork, but the classes like Math and Science are not as easy to learn outside of class. We also don’t have as much class time, so the teachers don’t have as long to teach us the content that they would have if we were in person. A lot of my classmates are struggling with keeping up with the amount of coursework we are getting from our teachers, as a byproduct of less class time. Also, they are already attending online classes for 5 or more hours a day, so they could just be burnt out from it. But anyway, back to the camp. One specific project that I helped out with was using “immortal” jellyfish to obtain human immortality or to have a longer lifetime. Obviously, they didn’t have any kind of plan to do it, but they just thought it was a cool idea. It’s good to think of ideas like that, but I think that them coming up with ideas like that and then getting told that they couldn’t actually do it is worse than finding out themselves. To improve on this experience for them, I would make some slightly stricter guidelines on what projects they could do. Some examples could be that you could complete it in a set timeframe, or whether it is possible with the equipment they have access to. Another thing that I would change in this camp is adding a peer review type of time when other groups have to look over your idea to see if it is doable. In this article, the author describes this by talking about how learning is best achieved by criticizing rather than ideation. I have only been to a few sessions so far, but I plan to go to all of them until it ends. Keep in touch for updates!