What Makes a STEM Workshop Fun?

A workshop where students sit quietly and watch someone demonstrate things is not a STEM workshop. It is a presentation. And presentations, even good ones, are mostly forgotten by the next morning.

At Avanza STEM, we spend as much time thinking about session design as we do about content. What students do in the room matters more than what we say to them.

The Difference Between Active and Passive

Passive learning means watching, listening, and receiving. Active learning means doing, testing, arguing, and building. The research on which one works better is not ambiguous.

But it is also not just about doing something. Students can be busy with their hands and still not really be thinking. A good workshop is designed so that the doing forces the thinking.

How We Design Avanza STEM Activities

Every activity we run goes through the same set of questions before we bring it to a workshop.

1. 1

   Is there a real test?

   If students cannot find out whether their idea worked, it is not a design challenge. It is an art project. Every activity ends with a test: does the bridge hold the weight? Does the rover cross the terrain? Does the code run?

2. 2

   Can it fail in an interesting way?

   Failure that teaches something is a feature. If the activity only succeeds or trivially fails, there is nothing to iterate on. The best failures are specific enough that students know what to fix.

3. 3

   Is there room for different approaches?

   A challenge with one correct answer turns into a race to find it. A challenge with multiple valid approaches lets students make genuine design decisions and learn from comparing results.

4. 4

   Are students talking to each other?

   Productive disagreement is one of the best signs that a session is working. When students argue about whether to add more diagonals or strengthen the joint, they are doing engineering.

What Students Actually Do at Our Workshops

At a typical Avanza STEM session, a student might do five or six distinct things in 60 minutes.

• Hear a two-minute prompt that gives them the goal and the constraints
• Argue with their partner about the design for a few minutes before building
• Build a first version and test it, often failing on the first try
• Make a specific change based on what they saw fail
• Test again and notice whether the change helped
• Explain to the group what they learned, not what they built, but what they found out

That last step is the one most workshops skip. When a student has to explain what they learned in words, they figure out whether they actually understood it or just got lucky.

Why Noise Is Usually a Good Sign

Quiet workshops make adults feel comfortable and usually make students feel less engaged. A session where students are talking, even loudly and even arguing, is a session where students are thinking.

“I thought they were getting off track because they were so loud about the zipper thing. But then I listened and they were actually debating whether friction was higher on the outside or inside of the curve. That is exactly what we wanted.”

The mentor's job in those moments is not to quiet the room. It is to ask one question that sharpens the argument.

The Three Things We Always Include

1. 1

   A real test with a real result

   Not 'good job, everyone'. Actual pass or fail against the stated goal.

2. 2

   A specific failure mode to learn from

   If everything works the first time, students did not learn what the limits were.

3. 3

   Time to explain what they figured out

   Building without reflection is just activity. Reflection is where the understanding consolidates.