Summer = travel. Travel = mugs! Like a lot of people, I enjoy taking home souvenirs from the new places I visit over the summer. Clever coffee or travel mugs, like my cable car-–shaped mug from San Francisco or the Mickey Mouse ear–shaped mug from Orlando, can be a fun reminder that keeps memories of that trip alive. These tokens of summer travel also provided the inspiration for a new STEM project to try out in my middle school classroom: asking students to create a tourist mug for our local community.
Focusing on the technology and engineering letters of the acronym, the project involves small teams of students using 3-D printing programs like TinkerCad or Fusion360 to design a mug that could be sold in our local Wisconsin tourist shops. Some students can tap into our Midwestern roots with mug designs that reference dairy cows or the Mississippi River. Or student teams can design a mug specifically for a local business, thereby requiring collaboration with "experts and allies, and thinking critically about the role of authentic audiences" (Boss, 2015, p. 3). At the conclusion of the project, all students will present their mugs to area businesses or organizations, such as the Chamber of Commerce, for expert feedback.
Now for those STEM bookends, the science and math applications inherent to this project. High-quality integration of STEM requires students to apply new knowledge to the real world, using that knowledge to solve critical problems, answer complex questions, and create high-quality products (Larmer, Boss, & Mergendoller, 2015). In my classroom, I not only want students to answer complex questions, but also to analyze the task and ask what information is needed to design a high-quality product. For this project, I envision students asking some variations of the following complex questions:
- How much liquid should a tourist mug hold? How can we mathematically verify our design before printing?
- Based on time and materials, how much should the mug cost?
- Given the unique design, what is the best way to package the mug?
- Can I drink out of my mug?
- What impact would extreme temperatures have on my mug?
- For food safety reasons, what type of filament should we use when 3-D printing a tourist mug?
To answer the first question, I plan for students to investigate how to build their 3-D mug out of 2-D cross sections. In examining the cross sections of regular mugs and student-designed tourist mugs, students will continue to make connections between 2- and 3-D geometric figures (CCSSM 7.G.A.3). Additionally, students will investigate how to calculate the volume of their nonstandard tourist mug by decomposing their mug into more traditional shapes such as cubes and right prisms, then testing and comparing this result with the actual volume when filling their mug.
Ideally, I hope my students continue to recognize that STEM is not just a "thing" we do; it is a way of thinking and forming connections across disciplines and the real world. STEM projects such as this provide students the freedom to explore, tinker, and create a final product based on their questioning, connections to local businesses, and wild imaginations. Now, I have the rest of the summer to imagine how to guide my students to deeply explore the questions in this lesson, and the questions yet to be asked.
