- Welcome to part two of Polyethylene Reef.
Exploring a cross-disciplinary approach of STEM
and visual arts.
In the last segment,
we explored the school STEM rationale
and their implementation of division.
In this segment,
we'll be looking at the teaching
and learning outcomes of being involved
in a collaborative project.
(bright music)
- My favourite part of being involved in this project
was probably
making the sculpture
and seeing everyone else building theirs
and getting ideas of theirs,
and getting ideas to build mine, figuring out what to do.
- Yes, it is a team effort,
we have grade seven, grade eight, great nine,
working on all of this as a group project.
So this is not an independent work.
- A lot of people don't know about all the plastics
in the ocean, for example,
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
and the impacts that it's having on the reef around it
and the Marine life.
We, researched different types of corals
to find inspiration for coral pieces
so that they could look as realistic as possible.
- My role with this project was the
coding and programming part
and here we have the LED strips shown here.
These LED strips are programmed by microbits
and they show the rainbow colours
in a way that has been coded using block coding
and each little line of block coding
tells the microbit to send the information
through the LED so it can light up in the rainbow manner.
- My role, I guess, as a manager,
was to do a lot of the logistics behind the scenes
to allow both Steph and Carolyn
to maximise what their strengths were,
which was actually working with students
and getting production done with Steph as well.
- Then my role and what I brought
to the Polyethylene Reef project was
I am a practising artist.
I've been an artist for the last 20 years.
Who's recently become a teacher.
So I bought my passion for using recycled
and sustainable materials to the project.
The stimulus artists was Aurora Robson from Hawaii,
and she works with plastics
from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
She creates these beautiful sculptures.
So I knew that we could create these
marine inspired sculptures using recycled plastic.
There was a study of the science in there,
but also adding technology to it where we're going to make
it interactive and we were going to add LED lights,
proximity sensors, motors, and coding and Arduino.
- I learnt from working with a team of other
cross curriculum teachers,
how energising it is when you do team up together
with like-minds,
but also people who are coming with different skill sets
and it is genuinely energising.
I learnt that it's really valuable
to have a head of department involved
who can manage the fact that classroom teachers
have extremely busy lives
and there's pinch points that happen.
So I was really pleased to take on that role of advocating
to admin to problem solve
and put out spot fires to enable the project,
to keep moving forward.
- Being an artist, my skill set is outside
of the technology.
So it was really interesting for me to work with motors
and microbits and soldiering and coding
and understanding how to take the art to the next level.
Because this generation of kids, they just want movement.
They want to see things.
They want to interact with things
a plain image isn't enough anymore.
They're see thousands of images every day
when they're on social media.
So for me, it was a real eye-opener
to see my own arts practise
and for the students to see how we can move on
from creating these beautiful sculptures
to the next level and make them interactive.
- One of the most interesting outcomes
I've seen in our students that,
particularly those who travelled to Brisbane was
their confidence and their leadership abilities
have increased phenomenally from this whole experience.
- The outcomes for the students
was a high level of engagement
across the whole project.
They loved the hands-on working with materials,
using box cutters and scissors, soldering irons,
and heat guns,
and really manipulating those surfaces
and then taking it to the next level,
by making it interactive
and then adding the LED
and the motors and the Arduino and the coding.
They really enjoyed the whole process,
seeing that come together and come alive.
- Thing that I'm most proud about is the skill building
that we were able to build into our year seven classes,
a diverse range of materials and equipment
that we challenged them with.
I know that they will take that
and will be able to build that
into future projects that we do.
One of my biggest learnings was not about project management
because that's bread and butter to many arts teachers.
That's what we do day in day out.
But it was my desire to actually learn more about coding,
which I already knew with a little bit of Arduino coding
and things like that.
But I now am really passionate about
taking that and working that in my main stream
visual arts classes, as well as my design classes.
So that's really made me hungry to learn a lot more.
- I would love to join Project Vortex,
which Aurora Robson started,
which operates at the intersection of art and science.
And it builds on creating global partnerships
so I would love to see for us to join that
and see how we can work with other people
from all over the world
so the students can interact with them.
- I think what we've already seen is that
apart from interdepartmental collaboration
and increased student engagement
is the development of a model of collaboration.
The ways of working supported by teams
and the sharing of practise
is something that I think the school is really excited about
and will continue doing.
Start by putting together a project proposal,
thinking it through and getting it down on paper.
Identify the purpose, any costs, and who will be involved.
Be clear about the connections to learning
and the school and community priorities.
Think about what support might be needed
and what other opportunities will be available.
Then take your proposal to the leadership team.
Remember you can get support from
your regional STEM champion
and access programmes such as
the CSIRO STEM professionals in schools,
and take advantage of programmes like curiosity
to connect with expertise outside of your school.