Wondering how to blend project-based learning with STEAM?

Yes, STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. Earlier this year we profiled The Cabot School's amazing public exhibition of sound sculptures highlighting water conservation. They were a big hit with the Cabot community, the students who made them and, it turns out, a fair number of you guys, too: our readers.

In this episode of The 21st Century Classroom, we talk with Cabot School educator Michael Hendrix. We hear about what it takes to pull off STEAM-powered PBL and why Hendrix feels you can't ever really teach science without art.

A full transcript appears below.

Michael Hendrix: We never use overhead lights. It kind of just… kids feel like it sort of sucks the soul out of the room. It’s sort of a gross feeling when you’re sitting under fluorescence, and so the stuff that we light the room with are these LEDs that we use with the AP Environmental Science class from two years ago when we did a project called Lillian, where we built a sustainable art and lighting sculptor piece to go with this folk opera that we were covering. We lit the room with all this alternative lighting and the kids won’t let me turn off the lights or won’t let me turn them on rather. So on darker days in the winter, this place is sort of like a pulsing, living thing. Yeah, it’s usually a pretty active place hence the mess.

Meet Michael Hendrix.

Hendrix: My name is Michael Hendrix. I'm a fifth-year teacher. This is my fourth year at Cabot School.  I teach Earth Science, Physics, Biology, AP Biology, Chemistry, AP Environmental Science, Maker Science this year, last year Statistics and Probability. I taught a senior experiential lab. I may be leaving something out.

What he's leaving out is that he tasked his current students with building Makey Makey-powered sound sculptures that helped raise awareness of water conservation and crisis. You might've heard about them on a previous episode of our podcast.

Students shared their sound sculptures with the Cabot community at a public exhibition, pairing their interactive art pieces with TED Talks on the water crisis. The community loved it.

We did too. So we set about asking Hendrix how he, as an educator, pulled this off with his students.

Hendrix: What students did is, we looked at the ideas behind fresh water and the water crisis, and all of the things that are happening with the world around preservation of water, and where are we going with the future of water, and in the process I knew my students needed to be doing some circuity and some basic programing. Also, learning how to build interfaces and sort of unpack basic programing.

So I came to them with the idea of, “Hey, let’s build an interactive art exhibit. It has to center around this idea of water, but in the process, let’s talk about what the things that you’re most interested in, in water.” So we looked at art. We looked at different installations of art just to help generate ideas; different water sculptures that other people had created in different contexts and different museums, to help to sort of prime them and get their brains going.

We also studied ambient music for a while too.

Wait. What does ambient music have to do with science?

Hendrix: So we were listening to Brian Eno’s early albums. Students were doing reviews on this music. We had a jam session with just our computers in here one day where we all tried to, without talking, communicate a certain sound or an idea, based on what that other person’s first note was that they played on their computer.

So we opened up GarageBand and had music typing up where we could play sort of a keyboard by using like ASDF, JKL. Students unpacked that and found out what sounds were dissonant and what sound...