I was invited to give a workshop by the wonderful folks at the Virginia Children’s Engineering Conference to 50 elementary school teachers. Participants built blinky name tags that showed our emotions, learned about how electricity moves, questioned how different LEDs “eat” voltage, collaboratively wrote stories, and created our own interactive storybook covers out of paper, conductive tape, LEDs, and craft materials. Aside from learning these design and engineering skills, the goal of this workshop was to open a conversation on how integrating the design process and narrative-based approaches to STEM can build a more inclusive, interest-driven, and creative learning environment.
I designed this zine to guide my students through the process. For all materials related to the workshop, please see this post. The full zine was created in Google slides for easy adaptation by educators.