GREENSBORO, N.C. — Guilford County Schools are working to incorporate S.T.E.M. education more in the classroom, showing students how subjects can connect with one another.
"One of the goals of the S.T.E.M. department is to ensure that S.T.E.M. isn’t something that is segregated in a science class, that it’s something seen throughout all content areas so that it is (...) a way of life and that students see it’s a way of life," said Faith Freeman, the director of S.T.E.M. for Guilford County Schools.
On Friday, fourth-grade students at Morehead Elementary School in Greensboro were using Legos' kits to build bobsleds and tracks to learn about momentum and speed.
"I think that (for) a lot of children it’s hard to synthesize what you’re reading from reading it from a text, especially children this age," said Megan Coble, a fourth-grade teacher at Morehead.
The kits are in every K-4 elementary school and were purchased through Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds for around $500,000 in total.
"The teachers now have those resources in order to do this in their classrooms," Freeman said, "Which hasn’t always been the case, especially at the elementary school level, so just giving teachers the opportunity to have these resources to share with their students."
Coble said the Legos' kits allow children to work together and see how subjects can connect with one another.
"It’s science, but we’re also going to be integrating math," said Coble. "We’ve already started the metric system so I’m gonna have them measure the distance in centimeters and then they’re going to do some conversion."
Hands-on learning is also popular with the students.
"School is way more fun if you get to learn it by using Legos or doing something fun," said Ben Adachi, a fourth-grader at Morehead Elementary School.
The lesson with Legos also allows students who may have never used the toys before to get experience with them.
"Legos are very expensive and so I feel like there’s kind of a divide socioeconomically," said Coble. "I’ve had several children who have never played with Legos before and they are actually highly intelligent and they’re great with them, they’ve just never had the experience."
In addition to the Legos, students are also learning different subjects, like science, through computer coding.
"The biggest thing is just being excited about giving teachers and students and schools the opportunity to implement, not just the engineering, but the coding but to do it in a way where it’s not disconnected," Freeman said. "So to do it in a way where it’s not something they do in a S.T.E.M class or in a S.T.E.M lab (but rather) that they are doing it in their science and math class."