STEAM Week at MIT

Last week, four Year 6 students and I were lucky enough to fly to Boston for STEAM Week at MIT. We joined students and staff from 25 other Nord Anglia schools for a five-day event packed with STEAM based events and challenges, all run in partnership with MIT.

Clark, Morgan, Viktor and Zoe had the opportunity to learn in workshops, talks and presentations across the week, and got to experience a bit of college life through eating in an MIT dining hall and having lectures from college professors!

Throughout the week, there were a range of workshops including Circuit Bending, where the students got to take apart children’s toys and see if they could program the electronics to do different things, and Physics and Photographing, where they learned how cameras work and experimented with shutter speed to take specific photos. 

On Wednesday, it was 2.009 day, which is named after a real-life MIT course. The students were split into 10 groups and had to work together to come up with a product with the theme ‘Sensational’, based around helping people who have disabilities linked to the senses. It was basically like doing the Maker Market in one day! It was a fantastic opportunity to put all the STEAM skills into practice and work collaboratively with other students.

The evenings were also packed with activities and one of our favorites was Boda Borg. This is a series of mini escape rooms where you solve mental or physical problems in order to complete the room. It definitely built on all of our resilience skills as there are no instructions, so you have to fail a few times before you get it right!

We arrived back in Chicago on Saturday exhausted, but inspired by everything we’d seen and done. We not only got to develop a range of skills and our STEAM knowledge, but also made new friends from around the world. It was an incredible experience and I know that MIT will have four very keen applicants in a few years!

-Becki Leo, Year 5 Teacher