Makers’ Day

First day of STEAM camp was conducted on July 18, 2016 at Friends Preschool and Activity Center. The camp was held under the umbrella of Maker space Islamabad. Maker Space Islamabad – a social enterprise dedicated to taking science education to a whole new level in Pakistan. The camp fostered Mathematics.
Students worked together in a constructionist, collaborative environment and solved real world problems related to architecture, nature and food sciences, basic robotics, kinetics,automation and basic electronics. The idea is to stimulate thinking, reasoning, teamwork, investigative and creative skills of a student, so that they are able to think out of the box and find solutions to problems in a more innovative manner.

The students really enjoyed interactive learning as I asked a few children what they liked the most. A 6 year old answered “Everything” while one said “The drawing Robot”. While working with different activities students have developed liking towards this way of learning and understanding.
This camp included Origami, architecture section, making of spinning rainbow wheel, creating drawing robots and wiggle bots. Some of the other activities were marbling and water skim.
Concepts like catalyst were explained to students by performing the “Elephant’s Toothpaste” experiment where hydrogen peroxide is mixed with soap and then the catalyst, potassium iodide, is added in order to speed up the reaction. Another interesting activity was marbling which explained the concept of surface tension. As chalk is added to water which floats on water and leaves an impression on a paper.
The camp this time also featured Nadeem Murtaza director of “Dheeray Bolo”. She concluded the session by giving it a tinge of music mentioning different things around us like the solar system, various inventions, their importance and their inventors etc.
Another Makers Day was held at Annie’s ELC marking the culmination of a second STEAM Camp at the mid of August. Campers from both the Friends Preschool and Activity Centre and Annie’s Early Learning Centre showed up to present their month-long assignments. They presented their projects and explained the logic behind their projects while also participating in games and special activities for Makers’ day.