During the innaugural week of school at NAIS Dublin, students across all year groups participated in a school-wide STEAM Week/MIT Challenge called "Street Smarts". Built around the theme of 'navigating tomorrow' the challenge put to our students was to tackle the opportunities and problems inherent in driverless car technology.
[[\media-dublin-blogs\MIT_STEAMWeek_Challenge_condensed.mp4]]Students were divided into teams incorporating multiple year groups, and were first tasked with constructing a model of the South County Business Park, where the school is located. Each team then had to work collaboratively to build and program a model of an autonomous vehicle that could navigate the track and arrive at the school independently.
The lessons and value of the project incorporated a range of disciplines that helped the students understand how their classroom studies translate into solutions for real-life challenges and future developments. Students combined knowledge from a variety of subjects to reach their unique team-based solutions.
The project also took on a wholistic IB learning approach, helping the students develop their social and collaborative skills as well as meta cognitive learning and problem-solving.
In the end students enjoyed a highly collaborative project with their new classmates and friends and participated in a spirited final competition to see which team's vehicle was best able to navigate the roads, roundabouts, trees and buildings to arrive at the final destination--Nord Anglia International School, Dublin!
#science #technology #engineering #arts #math
