Lesson Plan: STEM Career

Lesson Plan: STEM Career Designed by: Daniel S. Helman, PhD sustainability education, MS geology When I was taking second-year biology in high school, I collected algae (pond scum) from a stream in Pennsylvania and looked at it under a microscope. It turned out to be Spirogyra, and it was quite awesome. I decided to be a biologist. The next year, I had a wonderful chemistry teacher who told me that biochemistry was the hot new field. Her advice sounded good to me and I decided to be a biochemist. Fast-forward 46 years, to March 2007. I'm looking into the dissecting microscope in my home. I'm putting water on a piece of mica that my brother and I collected on a hike several months earlier. As I watch the water seep between the sheets of mica, it occurs to me: this might be a great place for the origin of life! —Astrobiologist responding to a questionnaire about her career path, "Ethical Considerations for Living Organisms Found Off-Planet or Created: Ideas from Astrobiologists and Computer Scientists," doctoral dissertation, Helman, 2017, p. 95–96. Subjects: Career education, homeroom, citizenship, health, science, computer science Grade level: Middle school, high school, college, career. This is a student-centered activity that will work with all four levels. Distance learning: Yes, this activity can be adapted to use in an electronic classroom. Time for this lesson: 50 minutes Content goals:  Students will be aware of STEM and STEAM and what they stand for.  Students will be aware of how varied the paths to a profession are in real life. Skills taught:  Quick reading for interest.  Identifying unknown vocabulary in readings.  Creative writing.  Public reading.  Critical thinking during group discussion. Materials needed:  Whiteboard / blackboard and enough markers / chalk for most or all of the class to use at once; or, some poster-sized paper that can be affixed to classroom walls and enough pens for most or all of the class to use at once.  Copies of the first set of readings for their students.  Copies of the second set of readings for their students. The two sets of readings can be found after the end of this document. Warm Up (2 minutes) 1. Teacher asks for a show of hands, "How many have heard of STEM? How about STEAM?" 2. Teacher gives a very, very brief introduction saying what the acronyms stand for, or asking students to say what the acronyms stand for. I became interested in philosophy at some point in high school. After reading a bit here and there I came to the conclusion that without understanding space and time I won't get further. So I studied physics. I studied some AI, robotics, and neuroscience on the side and at some point realized that I won't make it in string theory. So I asked myself what would I do if I already knew the end result of string theory, the grand unified theory. I thought I would want to find out what life is. So that is what I do now. —Astrobiologist responding to a questionnaire about his career path, "Ethical Considerations for Living Organisms Found Off-Planet or Created: Ideas from Astrobiologists and Computer Scientists," doctoral dissertation, Helman, 2017, p. 95. Content (10 minutes) 1. Teacher hands out the first set of readings, and introduces them as stories from a questionnaire given in 2016 to planetary scientists studying the origin of life, planetary habitability and related topics, plus computer scientists studying how machines learn, artificial intelligence, and artificial life—and some studying both. Teacher writes "Readings, Set One" on the board or on a poster-sized paper hung on the wall. 2. Students are instructed to read the stories and pick their favorite. Once they have one in mind, they are instructed to come to the whiteboard / chalkboard or poster-sized paper and write the number of their favorite reading and a few words about why they liked it. (If a student really doesn't like any of the readings, they may write the number 0. and give a reason.) Any unknown vocabulary words should also be written on the board. 3. Teacher spends a little time reading student answers on the board and assessing, plus helping to define any unknown words with the class. Application (10 minutes) 1. Students are instructed to write one or two very short stories of fictional people and how they got to be where they are professionally. (This can include any profession including homemaker and mother.) 2. The teacher picks one or two to read aloud to the class. Content (10 minutes) 1. Teacher hands out the second set of readings, and introduces them as more stories from the same questionnaire. Teacher writes "Readings, Set Two" on the board or poster paper. 2. Students are again instructed to read the stories and pick their favorite—and again writing the number plus a few words as to why it is their favorite on the board or poster paper. Any unknown vocabulary words should also be written on the board. 3. Teacher spends a little time reading student answers on the board and assessing, plus helping to define any unknown words with the class. Application (18 minutes) 1. Students are again instructed to write one or two very short stories of fictional people and how they got to be where they are professionally. (This can include any profession including homemaker and mother.) 2. Students share a few stories either as partners or in groups (maybe grouped by which reading was their favorite?) or a line up activity. (A line up activity has the class split into two lines facing each other. The two people opposite are now partners. After a short time, the teacher stops the activity and askes the first person in one line to move to the end of that line, and everyone else in that line moves up one, so now everyone has a new partner. The two people opposite each other now again engage in the activity. The process repeats with the teacher prompting the same line to progress each time, while the other is static, so that each time there is a new arrangement of partners.) 3. After the sharing is done the teacher asks for feedback: "How did you like this activity? What did you think of the stories? What did you think of the stories your peers wrote?" The teacher leads a discussion on how there are different kinds of career paths in life. [End.] First Set of Readings: Planetary scientists and machine-learning computer scientists share their stories 1. I became interested in philosophy at some point in high school. After reading a bit here and there I came to the conclusion that without understanding space and time I won't get further. So I studied physics. I studied some AI, robotics, and neuroscience on the side and at some point realized that I won't make it in string theory. So I asked myself what would I do if I already knew the end result of string theory, the grand unified theory. I thought I would want to find out what life is. So that is what I do now. 2. When I was taking second-year biology in high school, I collected algae (pond scum) from a stream in Pennsylvania and looked at it under a microscope. It turned out to be Spirogyra, and it was quite awesome. I decided to be a biologist. The next year, I had a wonderful chemistry teacher who told me that biochemistry was the hot new field. Her advice sounded good to me and I decided to be a biochemist. Fast-forward 46 years, to March 2007. I'm looking into the dissecting microscope in my home. I'm putting water on a piece of mica that my brother and I collected on a hike several months earlier. As I watch the water seep between the sheets of mica, it occurs to me: this might be a great place for the origin of life! 3. It was my original intention to become a medical doctor, and I prepared for such throughout high school and college. During my senior year of college, I decided that a career in medicine wasn't for me, so I instead entered grad school to study astrobiology and the origin of life; subjects which piqued my interest at the time (and still do). 4. I have always been interested in what makes life different than non-life. It was always the biggest question in my mind and much more interesting than any of the other subjects/questions. Growing up, I always became bored with everything very quickly. Physics and science was the only think that remained interesting after many hours of exploration. 5. This is a difficult question to answer, because I took a long and winding route towards what I do, while at the same time, in retrospect, I was drawn towards it from quite early on. I began by signing up for a degree in theoretical physics because I knew I wanted to answer deep and fundamental questions. However, for practical reasons I switched to a computer science degree part way through. My interest in evolution was sparked by studying genetic algorithms in that degree. My career since then, while varied, has always focused on using techniques from computer science, mathematics and physics to gain fundamental insights into the nature of the living world. Second Set of Readings: Planetary scientists and machine-learning computer scientists share their stories I. Basically, it was always clear for me that I wanted to become a natural scientist, from early childhood days on, so I hardly ever considered alternatives. Later on, as an undergraduate/graduate student, I just read books or papers, as many as I could, did internships in fields that I thought were the most interesting, and that "strategy" more or less directly took me to the work I am still doing today. II. I am an anthropologist, with a specialty in prehistoric archaeology and cultural evolution. However, I studied biology as an undergraduate and have always been interested in how biology, especially evolution, relates to the broader questions of meaning, purpose and other elements of humanity. I have not done actual research in the origins of life or the other specialties mentioned, but I am now involved in research support grantmaking in this area, so naturally have given it some thought, met a number of people and so on. III. I got interested in geology as undergrad. I found the slow tectonics of the continental interior where I lived interesting. I became involved in the start of plate tectonics in graduate school. I became involved in planets after the Apollo program had ended. I was on a National Research Council committee in the late 1980s. Question of large asteroid impact on early Earth and life came up. Since then I have been involved with that and with physical conditions on early Earth and planets with respect to life. IV. I have been fascinated with numbers and computers since early childhood. I began working professionally as a computer programmer over 50 years ago. After graduate school, I worked at a large technology company on the problem of speech recognition (making a computer type what a human being is saying) and machine translation (making a computer translate some thing that has been typed in one human language into something that is typed in another human language). Success in these two problems hinges, among other things, on the ability to predict what is coming next in a English sentence given what has already appeared in the sentence. One of my colleagues and I approach the people running the investments of the pension fund at work with the proposal that we could use our skills to predict future prices of financial instruments and thereby help with the management of the pension investments. Our firm was not interested in our idea, so we joined a financial company where I have worked ever since. V. My career has been some combination of active parenting and fortuitous events over which I had no control. My parents always emphasized mathematics as a key subject in my schooling, and my father pushed me towards a career in engineering. After realizing I enjoyed the physics "behind" the engineering much more than the application "within" engineering, I changed the emphasis of my studies to physics and mathematics, and decided to attend graduate school. While a graduate student, and after failing to connect with several potential advisors in my home department, a new faculty hire arrived whose interests in exoplanets and astrobiology were perfectly aligned with my own. My studies in planetary atmospheres, habitability, and biosignatures would never have occurred if not for my advisor arriving when she did at the right stage of my graduate career. VI. My academic curiosity was first ignited as a child sifting through Devonian fossil beds in Pennsylvania in the company of my father and sister. As I held fossil corals and trilobites in my hands, turning them over, I began to imagine the world in which the creatures that created these casts inhabited. It was a world far different from our own, though it occupied the same physical space. That imagining of worlds different from ours was joined with curiosity about astronomy and physics later in my schooling (middle school and high school). The characterization and modeling of exoplanet planetary systems takes the mind to the most exotic locales in the universe where, nonetheless, a person may imagine themselves standing and observing. I wanted to understand what kinds of worlds and places are out there, and science provides the framework to do that. Most critically, I wanted to contribute to our understanding of these places, potentially in the search for life elsewhere, and be able to relate this information to other curious individuals.