WOW

Working with the WOW volunteering program has been an extremely rewarding experience, and it has only been two months! Every Tuesday afternoon we go and visit students at various elementary schools in the Columbus area. We have many experiments and activities we can do with the students to help spark an interest in a STEM field. We teach schools in cycles of units, and our first unit this year was the scientific method. We used boxes with mystery objects inside of them, jars with beans, and crayons to measure their desks to have them question why things work the way they do and to apply the scientific method in trying to answer that question. My favorite experiment so far was Airplanes, where we had a small group of 1st grade students fly a plane made of styrofoam and change certain aspects to make it fly farther than it did before (plus we got to go outside).

To be honest, my group may have had an unfair advantage as my major is Aerospace Engineering, but everybody did great in the end! The goal of the experiment is to have the students understand dependent and independent variables and to begin thinking of better solutions to a problem, without just coming out and telling them. They added different weights at different places along the body of the plane, and at the end they chose one configuration that they thought would work the best. The moment that really made this memorable happened right after we finished with all of the instructions given to us. Two of my students kept asking me if they could try something on their plane that they thought of on their own. I said that they could go ahead and I helped them put on their weights. Both of their planes flew straight into the ground. As amusing as it was watching their two planes dramatically nose dive, it was their reaction afterwards that really inspired me. They came running back with more ideas on what to try next. The only reason we had to stop was because it was time to leave. Even though they failed, they were excited to keep going. They really made me think about how to look at not only solving problems, but life as well. I can’t wait to see how the next time will go.