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I'm hoping you can help me design better instruction, with some expert advice based on your knowledge and teaching experience. Although I have a PhD in Cuuriculum & Instruction (especially re: Science Education) from U of Wisconsin in Madison, I don't have any experience with classroom teaching for K-12. And my situation is unusual because I'm part of a 10-person team that is developing activities for occasional (every other month) STEM-Project Mornings, for kids with their parent(s).
Of course, we want to design activities with appropriate difficulty -- as in a well-designed mystery story -- so kids (and parents) will be active and interested, so they won't be bored (if it's too easy) or frustrated (if it's too difficult), so they will be challenged but will succeed and will feel the resulting satisfactions.
But achieving an appropriate difficulty is more difficult for us, compared with a typical year-long classroom, due to our range of ages (7-11), and because we have very little control over their prior experiences.
Specifically, in 10 days (Saturday, September 17) one of our activities will be 'Make a Flashlight' using a button battery and LED(s) plus other materials. For our team, and now also for you, I've written a section (it's the last part of a page about principles & activities) for this activity, describing possible mini-activities (Science Questions, and extra Engineering Design Challenges) that we could do.
I'm wondering... Do you know any useful web-pages for this kind of activity? Maybe with a basic 'activity design' that isn't the one (by mysteryscience.com) we're using? Do you have any ideas & advice about how to design our activity (especially by using mini-activities) to make it a better experience for our guests?
BTW, I'm posting this in two NSTA Forums -- yours (Elementary Science) plus 'General Science and Teaching' -- for discussion, and in two others (Informal Science, Physical Science) I'm just saying where it's being posted.
Craig Rusbult
https://educationforproblemsolving.net/
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