STEAM Festival

Before the festival, the children were challenged to design a car which could take an important climate scientist from one side of the United States to the other along Route 66. They researched the climate and terrain along the route and designed a vehicle that could traverse this great distance safely, while keeping the scientist and driver safe and comfortable.  

The festival was a busy two days of challenges and collaborations that showed the excellent problem-solving skills these children have. The focus of the festival was Extreme Weather - linked with the MIT-NAE challenges that have dominated this year’s STEAM section on Global Campus.  

During the festival, the children had the opportunity to collaborate with their buddy schools in Vietnam and Cambodia. We were all impressed with each other’s ideas and solutions and were given a creativity award from Northbridge in Cambodia and an award for curiosity from BVIS Hanoi.  

The main challenge was introduced by a climate scientist in the Arctic, who told the students that their research was indicating that the current rate of Arctic ice melting would cause a rise in sea levels of 250 metres over the next 10 years. Our challenge was to either mitigate the effects of this disaster or find ways to slow the cause.  

The Pari Manta class quickly got planning and came up with two ideas: to create an underwater habitat for a large population that could be replicated in coastal areas around the world; and to refreeze the Arctic! Our main challenge was interspersed with smaller challenges including researching a recent extreme weather event and presenting it as a case study, creating a water purification system for a poor community who had suffered from an extreme flood, and creating a menu from plants that could grow in the salt water of our new ‘water world’. 

The children planned, designed, collaborated, modelled, and tested to create some incredible inventions. The underwater city had a river that utilised tidal power and grew crops, had all the facilities for a community to safely live in, and created its own oxygen and absorbed carbon dioxide from the plants in the dome.  

They chose to refreeze the Arctic by taking advantage of the difference between the temperature of the unfrozen water under the ice shelf (-1.8ºC) and the air temperature above the ice shelf (around -40ºC). They designed a floating, solar powered pump that could extract water from under the ice shelf and pump it onto the top of the ice shelf where it would freeze instantly. 

These challenges, and the children’s responses to the challenges, highlighted how STEAM utilises the children’s science, maths, art, and communication skills to solve huge problems. It also gave me a little more hope for the future.