‘There’s a real motivation for learning’: Grand Isle highlights STEAM program in inaugural fair

GRAND ISLE – Geometry with toothpicks and marshmallows. Microscopes and animal skulls. Homemade video games and robot sketches pinned to classroom walls.
Community members saw all of the above as they toured the Grand Isle School during the school’s inaugural “STEAM” fair earlier this month. For around an hour, parents were welcomed to join their students with activities meant to celebrate school programming centering the sciences and arts.

At one station, visitors were challenged to build geometric shapes from marshmallows and toothpicks, a project helping visualize some of the mathematics students had practiced. In another station, people were invited to play simple video games developed by Grand Isle students with an educational coding program known as Scratch.
One station promoted Lego builds, and another made a game with magnets. Nearby, a pair of middle school students filled in for Grand Isle’s musical education teacher to lead a musical workshop.

According to school officials, the night was meant to celebrate the Grand Isle School’s growing STEAM program while giving command of those celebrations to the students. It was the students who met visitors as they walked through the school’s doors, and, with some help from their teachers, it was the students who managed the different stations scattered throughout the building.

“The kids are really excited to be leaders,” Ashley Hanlon, the principal of the Grand Isle School, told The Islander. “I think the kids feel a huge sense of pride and ownership.”

For the past two years, the Grand Isle School has piloted a modest STEAM program meant to introduce its students to topics like programming and robotics. “STEAM” refers to science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics, an interdisciplinary approach to teaching science- and engineering-related topics that pairs those lessons with the arts.
Under the guidance of educators like Karen Blow and volunteers like Jim Hoag, the Grand Isle School’s nascent STEAM program has grown since its introduction last year, with teachers bringing some pieces of that education originally introduced to Grand Isle’s fifth- and sixth-graders to younger grades.

According to Blow, school leaders were hoping to give Grand Isle’s students an introduction to some of the science- and technology-related topics they could encounter as they graduate from Grand Isle and begin attending classes in larger schools. Educators compared the program to an elective older students might take in a larger school district.
“This is really bringing in science, technology, engineering, art and math into our school,” Blow told The Islander. “Being a small school, we think it’s important to encourage STEAM, so students will have that knowledge before they head off-island.”

Extending those lessons to the arts, Blow added, allowed her students to be more expressive and helped make lessons associated with science and technology more accessible.
“The arts are amazing, and we need more art for younger folks,” Blow said. “Some kids aren’t as capable with the other topics, but they can really excel with the arts.”

When speaking with The Islander, several fifth- and sixth-grade students participating in the Grand Isle School’s STEAM program said they preferred working with their hands and suggested it was helpful to see some of the concepts studied in science and math classes in person.

“I like building stuff,” Keaton Hamblett, one of the two students charged with the STEAM fair’s geometry station, told The Islander. “A lot of kids like being showed something, instead of just being taught it.”

“And using tools instead of just using paper,” added Bentley Stanhope, another student staffing the fair’s geometry station. “It just looked cool.”

Students Kolton Blow and Everett Stowell highlighted the coding and programming lessons included in the Grand Isle School’s STEAM initiative. The two students, who were helping watch the entrance to the school’s inaugural STEAM fair, said they liked both the challenges that came with coding, as well as the more hands-on parts of their STEAM classes.

“We’ve done robots, and we’ve made games,” Kolton Blow said. “I love technology.”

“It’s more fun and more interactive,” Stowell agreed. “You get to move around with more materials.”

In the school’s gymnasium, two students, Oskar Pentenrieder and Kamdyn Manor, were presenting the video games they had made through their STEAM lessons. Using the educational Scratch program, the two had programmed simple video games, with Pentenrieder developing a game similar to the arcade game Frogger and Manor styling his program after popular first-person shooters.

“It wasn’t too difficult, but it did take a while,” Pentenrieder said as he toggled with his game’s programming in the Scratch application. “I messed up the coding a little.”
Hoag, a retired computer sciences professor and volunteer who helped teach Grand Isle’s programming lessons the year before, watched over the students’ presentation from nearby.

According to Hoag, students like Pentenrieder and Manor who participated in the school’s STEAM program the year before seemed eager to return to those lessons for the program’s second year.

“They really recovered what they did last year,” Hoag told The Islander. “For the ones who get it, there’s a real motivation for learning.”

At the moment, STEAM programming at the Grand Isle School is still in its early stages. School officials said, however, that they were interested in expanding the program as grant funding allowed.

“It’s a different type of outlet, and the kids love it,” Hanlon, the school’s principal, said. “We’re looking at different grants to bring new materials in, and the hope is to just keep expanding it.”