Carly Deboice, program developer at TELUS World of Science in Calgary, Alberta, answers a few questions about her work, how she collaborates with local teachers, and how she makes use of howtosmile.org.
SMILE: Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you work, and your relationship to hands-on math and science.
Carly: I work full time for the New Science Centre in Calgary, Alberta (a project of TELUS World of Science). I'm developing programs for schools and for the public who will visit our new facility. This covers a wide audience, but many of my programs are for grades 1-9. Our organizational mandate leads us to be more interested in science than math (at the moment). I also have a degree in science, so there’s a bit of a bias there. [Carly majored in Biology and minored in Chemistry at the University of Calgary; she also has a degree in Economics.]
SMILE: What's your favorite howtosmile activity and why?
Carly: Probably the build-your-own marble machine. It's called Thrill Ride and you can use it for various audiences, including school groups made up of kids in grades 3 and 7 (the Alberta curriculum has those grades working on designing and testing materials). We first used it in a school workshop.
Read more about why Carly chose Thrill Ride and how she makes it work for her.
SMILE: So you were looking for something that would fit with grade-level curriculum? How did you determine that this activity was a good fit?
Carly: My role is mainly as a school programmer, so we are usually looking for curricular links. We work closely with our school board liaisons to ensure that the proposed activities do meet the curricular needs, and help teachers justify field trips to our facility. Checking in with these experts usually helps us to ensure a good fit. I have them on speed dial.
SMILE: Though it relates to U.S. and not Canadian standards, was the National Science Education Standards pdf attached to the Thrill Ride activity useful for you? (It's available at the bottom of the record page, under "Other.”)
Carly: Ahhh, National Standards. Essentially, these are pretty useless to us up North. Sometimes, they help us to gage the age-appropriateness of the activity, but that’s about it. There is something called the "Pan-Canadian" curriculum that was sort of a failed project to make science education nationalized, similar to in the U.S. In Canada, curriculum for science is provincially mandated, and it looks as though it will stay that way.
SMILE: Was the school workshop you mentioned at TELUS or did you travel to a school and do an onsite workshop?
Carly: Our facility is working towards opening the doors of a new location this fall (see artist's model of the New Science Center, above). In the past, we've run workshops onsite, but recently we've been doing a lot of offsite visits, testing out new programs to be ready in our new space. Something new we've done this past year is setting up "school residencies" where we prepare a bunch of new workshops that are almost complete. Then, we head out to a school for a whole week (or two!) to test out the various program ideas with every class in the school we can accommodate.
Since they’re acting as our "guinea pigs," we offer the workshops for free. In exchange we ask the teachers and students for feedback on the experience. We learn so much from the residencies, and we model for the community that we are learners as well.
It was a struggle to put programs out that feel "not ready yet," however, this ends up saving us more time in the long run, and helps us fulfill one of our internal programming philosophies which is "Programs meet our mission, vision and values" (which we affectionately refer to within our team as "No $%&# on the floor"). The workshops we test offsite will become activities for students on field trips to the New Science Centre.
SMILE: Did the activity take about as long as the write-up in SMILE said it would? Were the estimated prep time and materials costs accurate?
Carly: Yes, they were. I do find, however, that if you’re going to run any activity, you'll have to redo the costs, find vendors, etc. However, for overall budgeting and estimation, this is a great feature, and I've found it to be pretty accurate with the howtosmile activities I've used so far.
SMILE: What howtosmile feature do you most appreciate?
Carly: Lists are the best! I liked howtosmile. Then lists arrived. Now, I LOVE howtosmile.
SMILE: How would you like to see howtosmile grow and change? How could howtosmile be more useful to you?
Carly: I wish there was some way to get museums to commit someone to be a "howtosmile" liaison, so there is a little more activity on the site. I know if it was more part of my "job" I would dedicate a little more time to commenting and posting new activities.
SMILE: Anything you'd like to add?
Carly: I really like that there’s a "quality" filter at howtosmile.org. Many sites have activities that are tired, traditional, and boring. I find that the howtosmile community is promoting a new type of learning, and there is less of a filtering process you have to go through to find something that you need.