About this project
At Pre-U Junior, we organized different activities for primary school children who are interested in science and technology. The two main projects I was coordinator of were Xperimenta and the launch of the W&T (science and technology) lesson series at primary school locations.
Roles: Instructional designer, instructor, coordinator
Skills: Instructional design, science communication, project management
Xperimenta
Each month, I organized an afternoon for primary school children, called Xperimenta, where the children would learn about a new STEM topic. I arranged and guided a guest speaker, who was usually a lecturer from the University of Twente, to give a presentation for the children on the topic of that week. Furthermore, I developed theme specific experiments (or guided and coordinated other student assistants in the development of this educational material). The topics that I worked on ranged from robotics to archeology and from DNA to sustainability.
The experiments largely followed the didactics of ‘Onderzoekend and Ontwerpend leren’, where the instructions were split up into the phases:
1. ‘Confrontatie’ - to encourage curiousity,
2. ‘Verkennen’ - to find out about the prior knowledge of the children and to invite the children to come up with questions and ideas,
3. ‘Aan de slag’ - where the children get to work with the experiment,
4.1 ‘Evaluatie: doel behaald?’ - where we evaluated what the conclusion is of the experiment and whether or not the goal was met and why (not),
4.2 ‘Evaluatie: Wat vonden de kinderen?’ - where we evaluated what the children thought about the experiment: was went well, what was difficult,
5. ‘Verbreden of verdiepen’ - where the instructor dives a little deeper into the topic the children just worked on, now that the instructor has a better image of where the children are at in their knowledge.
Onderzoekend & ontwerpend leren didactics
In the lessonplan for the experiment, each phase contains a description of what the instructor should say or do and what the children should say or do, including how long the phase should approximately take (since the program was quite strict with 6 small experiments in 1,5 hours).
For more detailed information on the experiments and educational materials, don't hesitate to contact me. Due to intellectual property rights I am not allowed to share the content of the documents.
Xperimenta afternoon about Size
W&T lesson series
More coming soon...