Students at École Qayqayt Elementary School got to try their hands at woodworking recently – thanks to a group of New Westminster Secondary School plumbing students.
The maker event, held on Nov. 2 at Qayqayt Elementary, was the first Industry Training Authority-sponsored event of the school year. Organized by the career programs department at the high school, the goal of the event was to help the elementary students work through a problem using design-thinking.
“At this age, this is still new for them. What is design-thinking? How did we solve this problem? Did the problem actually get solved? And that’s the thing with design-thinking, it doesn’t always get solved. We need to be able to go back and forth to solve problems in a way that makes sense,” Gary Pattern, trades teacher at the high school, told the Record.
Pattern has been leading the charge in the district to get more schools onboard with the new applied design, skills and technology curriculum. Part of this project included the creation of maker spaces on wheels – portable carts filled with power tools and other equipment that can be used by all schools to conduct their own design-thinking projects.
And soon each school in the district will have its very own cart. Pattern is still making his way from school to school to train other teachers to use the equipment in the carts.
These carts, and much of Pattern’s work on the ADST curriculum, has been funded by a special Ministry of Education grant the district received three years ago. The district also receives a substantial amount of funding from the Industry Training Authority of B.C. to put on events and to support ADST training and collaboration in the district.
Many of the supplies at the Qayqayt event, for example, were purchased using funds provided by the training authority.
At the Qayqayt event, students in grades 2 to 5 were put into groups with a student-leader from the high school’s plumbing apprenticeship program and were tasked with creating something that could hold memories. The day began with them working out a solution to this problem and the end result was a memory box handmade by the students.
Students also learned about New Westminster’s local Aboriginal people – the Qayqayt First Nation – through this process.
“We’re really trying to create critical thinkers and problem solvers. Instead of just typing it into the internet and Google searching a problem, they’re coming up with the problem that is real world and I think it’s giving them a skill-set that employers are looking for later in life,” Pattern said.
