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Teachers go out on a STEM

| June 22, 2018 1:00 AM

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Gizmo’s Dinah Gaddie shared a lighthearted STEM moment with educators at the i-STEM program in Coeur d’Alene June 21. (JUDD WILSON/Press)

By JUDD WILSON

Staff writer

COEUR d’ALENE — Educators from around North Idaho took part in the i-STEM professional development program this week at North Idaho College. The workshop is sponsored by the Idaho STEM Action Center, a collaboration of private and public agencies in the Gem State. Teachers here got hands-on learning opportunities on how to teach geometry with origami, code and program in a makerspace, understand the thought processes of computational thinking, and experience STEM in aviation.

The program, now in its ninth year at NIC, increases teacher confidence with STEM subjects, said Region 1 i-STEM Coordinator Gail Ballard. Teacher confidence leads in turn to more classroom instruction spent on those subjects, and greater results for students during their assessments, she said. By blending science, technology, engineering, and mathematics rather than isolating them, students grasp concepts and develop skills they need for the 21st century, she added.

“It’s Idaho teachers teaching Idaho teachers. They take the best of the best and share those ideas,” she said.

Marci Barrett taught other Idaho educators how to utilize origami in the classroom. Thanks to the structural integrity of items that are folded, scientists have developed many high-tech applications of origami in medicine, aviation, satellites, and more, she said.

Barrett worked to build educators’ skills so they can go back to their classrooms ready and eager to teach origami for STEM purposes. Even the littlest kid, such as the elementary students she teaches, can grasp concepts such as cubes, flips and rotations.

“They understand what a ‘Tyrannosaurus rex’ is,” she said. “Why not ‘rotate’?”

This year approximately 40 people took part, which included both classroom teachers and others such as special educators and librarians, Ballard said.

Community Library Network librarian Nick Madsen said the program’s pacing was perfect. The weeklong program began with foundational concepts and then built on that. He took part in the aviation course, which gave him the chance to visit with local employers during a field trip.

Madsen said he was impressed with how aligned employers in the field and aviation educators at NIC were. The skills taught in the classroom matched exactly the skills needed in the workplace.

All the i-STEM participants will go home with a materials kit worth around $200, which is quite a lot compared to their ordinary classroom budgets, Barrett said. The i-STEM program gives the kits, and offers a lending library, in order to make it possible for educators to directly apply what they learned here this week, she said.

The Idaho STEM Action Center scheduled similar workshops this month at Lewis-Clark State College, Idaho State University, the College of Southern Idaho, the College of Eastern Idaho, and in the Treasure Valley.

According to the Idaho STEM Action Center, “Idaho’s unfilled STEM jobs leaped from 3,800 in 2016 to 6,000 in 2017, which represents nearly $355 million in lost personal wages and more than $20 million in lost state tax receipts. The Idaho Department of Labor predicts as many as 36,000 STEM jobs could be unfilled by 2024 if the trend continues and would represent more than $120 million in lost state tax revenue annually.” The center began work in 2015 to tackle this problem. For more information, go to STEM.Idaho.gov.