STOMPers, Christopher Camacho and Camille-Louise Mbayo, share their curriculum used during the Fall 2016 semester in a 5th grade class with 19 students. STOMP is our Student Teacher Outreach Program. If you want more information, visit STOMPnetwork.org

Description of your curriculum

Our curriculum covers the physics behind sports including soccer, football, ice hockey, sailing, and figure skating. The uniqueness of our curriculum stems from showing kids that engineering is in things they least expect. Our curriculum integrates the physical, mental, and materials portion of sports. For example, we went over projectile motion while talking about the best degree to throw a football. We used slingshots that the students made to mimic the trajectory of the ball. We talked about materials being weaker at grain boundaries while making soccer nets. We also discussed momentum in figure skating through making spinning tops.

Where did the inspiration come from?

We were inspired to do the curriculum the first day we went into the classroom. During our observations, we noticed that as the students introduced themselves they all mentioned being interested in sports like soccer, basketball, baseball, and gymnastics. We then discussed the idea of making a curriculum focused on sports. After talking to the teacher, we concluded that it would be the best route since the students were already passionate about it. That passion would allow them to engage with our lesson activities. To ensure that all students would be interested in this curriculum, we based it off the sports that they mentioned, covering a wide variety of sports and the science behind them.

What are the learning goals?

The goal is to provide a hands-on approach to the science behind sports so that the students can apply this knowledge as they participate in these sports in their everyday life. Moreover, we want the students to realize that engineering is everywhere in their lives. Engineering is a very broad field and it includes the many things that they enjoy doing every day. The more students realize this, the more they believe that they too can be engineers and it’s not just for people who are good at math.

How has it been going?

Going into the classroom, no matter how much planning is done before, is always full of surprises. Moreover, since this unit has never been done, a lot of these are activities haven’t been tested yet in the context of a STOMP classroom. Sometimes we go into the classroom hoping for the best but expecting some failures and every time the students surprise us. For instance, for our soccer net activity we brought multiple materials and hoped that the students would experiment with all the materials we brought. However, they did not and most of them used similar materials. Although, our original intent was to talk about different material properties we ended up talking about grain boundaries and how similar materials are weakest where they at boundaries.