Challenging Students to Learn

Glenn Bradbury, Introduction to Engineering Design and Digital Electronics Teacher
Bozeman High School, Bozeman Public Schools, MT

Tired of giving students prescribed projects that result in every group creating the same thing in the same way?

Glenn Bradbury, the Introduction to Engineering Design and Digital Electronics teacher at Bozeman High School in Bozeman, Montana, started looking for a better way. As he puts it...

“The thing that I detest the most, as an educator, is when I see programs that are very much ‘monkey see, monkey do,’ [where] there is never any opportunity or any requirement for the student to have to apply what they learn.”

With that in mind, Bradbury turned to SparkFun and the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit (SIK).

The kit, which includes a step-by-step guidebook, provided a good starting point for Bradbury’s lessons. After teaching the basics of circuit building and programming using the included guidebook, Bradbury challenged his students to create a marble-sorting machine using the skills they had learned. Every group was given the same materials and the same challenge: create a machine that is capable of telling the difference between dark and light marbles. From there, students created their own designs and machines.

Students were forced to really think about what they had learned and how it could be applied to their specific project. They could make their design as simple or complex as they wanted, as long as it achieved the desired goal. Students had to go through the steps to figure out how to solve the problem. In the end, Bradbury said the machines were all put together differently and all looked different, which was exactly what he had hoped for.

This project allowed students to push their learning “as far as they [felt] comfortable pushing it.” Bradbury says every group encountered problems along the way, but since they were each taking a different approach, they were forced to use what they had learned to figure out the solution as a group. “It’s more of a real-world experience,” he says. “It teaches a little more persistence or grit.”


Gaining Needed Skills

“I want my kids to think, and that’s what I believe they will learn to do if they are put in a situation where they aren’t given all the steps. They have to learn how to think to solve those problems, not just follow a recipe. The worst thing in the world to me is a kid who only learns to follow a recipe.”

Bradbury says that, even though he has been using this approach for more than 15 years, one of the biggest challenges he faces is helping other teachers find the professional development options they need in order to feel confident making the switch in their own instruction. “There are still quite a few teachers at all different levels that kind of look at the Arduinos and microcontrollers as almost magic,” he says, recounting a time when his school principal and resource officer observed his class. “My principal and the school resource officer came in and watched the machines as we were testing them. The resource officer spent the whole day in my room; he loved watching all this stuff. I heard the two of them talking, and the principal was like, ‘I have no idea how the kids do this stuff; this is all magic to me.’ ”

For those who feel this way, Bradbury recommends finding classes — like the SparkFun Microcontrollers for Educators course he took — that cover the basics of teaching with electronics. Once you have a basic grasp on how things work, he recommends jumping in and giving it a try. Don’t wait until you know everything, or you’ll never get started.

Bradbury also stresses the importance of being honest with students. “If you don’t know the answer, you just say, ‘I don’t know the answer,’ because guaranteed, you’re gonna have a kid in there that knows the answer or knows how to find it out. ...There were a couple of kids that were way ahead of my ability on the programming side, and they jumped ahead pretty quickly.”

Part of shifting to problem-based learning is encouraging students to ask one another for help when they run into problems instead of always turning to the instructor. “You’re going to learn, they’re going to learn, and the kid that has the problem is going to learn,” Bradbury says. “And it all works together and makes a much friendlier learning environment all around.“


Defeating Self-Doubt

Bradbury says that over the years he has encountered self-doubt about whether his approach is the best one for his students. “You always have that question in the back of your head: Am I really doing what I should be doing, or can I do something different to make it better?” But, his doubt has been quieted by former students who got into a good school or college and came back to tell him they appreciated his instructional approach because it made them more prepared.

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