07-05-2025
Lockport schools help students explore and explain STEM
Whether it's exploring traits of organisms or building a robot that can throw frisbees, students across the Lockport City School District are immersed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The success of the district's 12-year science instruction transformation was brought home recently when Lockport's STEM team The Warlocks competed in the international FIRST Championship in robotics in Houston.
At last week's districtwide STEM Night, the Warlocks demonstrated its robot Decibel's ability to retrieve and throw orange frisbees called 'notes.' Working within a size and weight limit, students built the robot to move on a series of rollers similar to vacuum cleaner brushes. The team adapted Xbox controllers to navigate the machine and control its frisbee shot. The Warlocks placed fifth in a regional tournament at Miami Valley, Ohio.
Competing against the best in the nation April 19, The Warlocks won the Imagery Award that recognized their outstanding visual design, theme integration, and overall team aesthetic.
'Every student in our district is getting hands-on exposure to STEM,' said Denyel Beiter, the district's public relations specialist. 'That's something we've been really intentional about as part of our K–12 STEM Framework. Our goal is to build STEM learning that's rigorous, connected across grade levels, and grounded in real-world problem-solving.'
For STEM Night, third-graders Delaney Lute and Kyla Castle presented their class's model for how an organism could adapt to feed itself. Using marbles as potential food, the students tested the effectiveness of spoons and forks as body parts for feeding. The students were asked to build an adaptation that worked better than the spoon. Using chopsticks, clay, and tinfoil, the students built a scoop appendage that performed even better.
According to Lisa Stastyshyn, a science instructional coach at Lockport's elementary schools, the project demonstrates the latest, hands-on approach to STEM learning, which begins in elementary school.
The shift from 'old-school' science teaching, which focused on memorization, to three-dimensional learning, began in 2013 when Next Generation Science Standards were introduced, Stastyshyn said. The standards were developed by a consortium of 26 states. Content is arranged in a coherent manner across disciplines and grades to provide all students with an internationally benchmarked science education.
'It's more hands-on experience and uses an inquiry model,' she said. 'It's more of a way that the teacher steps back and becomes the facilitator of the learning. We give kids a phenomenon to experience. Then we ask them to consider, think about, and explore that phenomenon.'
Stastyshyn said as teachers, 'We don't want to interfere with their thinking' at this stage. Letting students work with models and parts allows them to see concepts at work, and helps children comprehend the subject, she said.
Stastyshyn describes the instructional method as a series of steps beginning with E; expose, explore, explain, evaluate, and extend. In some ways, it mirrors the scientific method.
She said students get 'a taste' for something that occurs, explore it to come up with their own conclusions and questions, and then the teacher explains what is known about it.
'From that point on, the students are figuring a lot on their own,' Stastyshyn said. 'The teacher clarifies any misconceptions.'
The teacher evaluates how well students understand the lesson, and then extends it, prompting children to push their own thinking further. This step got third-graders involved in using engineering principles of design and use of materials to see how a living thing's physical structures might help it survive.
At the elementary level, each year is split into physical science, earth science and life science, Stastyshyn said.
'It gets more complex each year,' she said. 'In fifth grade, they're really getting into materials, their properties, and testing them. They're looking more into the chemical reactions and performing data collection.'
In grades 6-8, students' instruction branches off into specific sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and biology, she said.
