Over the summer, the Frank Porter Graham Bilingue School teacher developed an innovative new space unit for the third graders. In January, the school submitted the program to the Follett Challenge, a national competition that rewards innovative learning programs.
A North Carolina Science Festival internship during summer 2014 taught Stewart about the physics of flight. She decided to use what she learned to revamp the third grade unit on space.
“I kind of took those pieces of the curriculum in mind and pushed the envelope a little bit with it because there’s no standard about space exploration,” Stewart said.
The nine-week unit started in October and concluded in the first week of December with a presentation to a panel that included North Carolina State University engineering students and Stewart’s mentors from the science festival.
After learning and researching the physics of outer space, the 50 third-grade students broke into groups to design land rovers and used 3-D printers at Smith Middle School and Duke University to generate small-scale models of their spacecrafts.
“Learning doesn’t happen on a flat surface,” Assistant Principal Jose Nambo said. “Learning doesn’t happen on paper or the screen — it’s live.”
The unit wasn’t just science — the students also wrote five-paragraph essays to persuade companies to buy their craft. The school is bilingual, so the students learned to advertise and market their crafts during the Spanish half of the day.
