Teacher Tips
Welcome to the STEAM Monster Design Challenge. This online platform called the STEMarts Design Tool was designed to assist you through the activity of having your students design a STEAM Monster to enter into the challenge. It provides a support system and resources for you as teacher/facilitator. Once registered, we suggest to review the Entry Guidelines to communicate and reinforce the design constraints. We offer two areas that can be used as student-directed tools. They are the Get Started tool and the STEAM-Wiki. You can either use them to prepare your lesson or you can direct students to these areas to access them directly.
To start we suggest that you explore the site to become familiar with all the resources and guidelines. Then decide on the medium you will be using for your project so that you can prepare your classroom materials. Will it be Sharpies, Photoshop or other free graphics software? Will it be animation software? The artist suggests using colored Sharpies or a graphics program, but it can be anything as long as the final image can be digitized and adheres to the Entry Guidelines.
The STEMarts Methodology was developed by STEMarts Lab and implemented as part of school workshops, festival youth programming and online curriculum tools since 2009. We used this field tested methodology to inform the design of the Paseo Project’s STEAM Monster Design Challenge. The chart below provides a visual illustration of the key components that guide all the activities and intended outcomes followed by a brief description of the key sections of the STEMarts Design Tool.