When Students are Part of School Tech Support, They’re in Charge of Their Learning
As the number of devices at schools expand, so has the need to repair and maintain. Students have been tapped to do some of the work, while gaining valuable hands-on experience in STEM.
Like many schools across the country, Burlington High School in Burlington, Massachusetts began using iPads as one-to-one devices in 2011. In the years following, the school’s small IT department needed a boost, according to LeRoy Wong, who has been Burlington High School’s digital learning coach since 2016. The solution? A help-desk elective was created to teach students the basics of tech support.
The class is still going strong today, thirteen years later, but it has evolved. “I found that students want to kind of go beyond [troubleshooting] and just learn more about different types of technology,” said Wong, who also teaches computer science at the school.
Tech support for digital natives, it turns out, can be a great way to ignite a deeper interest in STEM and self-led learning.
Student-led Learning
The students in Wong’s help-desk elective still provide tech support as needed to the school, but they also explore topics like robotics, video game design, music and sound production. There’s no previous knowledge of tech required for the elective. According to Wong, some students come in with little prior knowledge wanting to learn more, while others who have had previous exposure come into the elective with a project in mind.
The school’s video game design program was started after students in the help-desk elective took interest in the subject. Wong was able to create a program that quickly surpassed his own experience and understanding of the subject, he said.
Gati Aher, who graduated from Burlington High School in 2019, was drawn to the help-desk elective in her junior year after she developed an interest in computer science. Aher, who went on to get a degree in engineering and is now a PhD candidate in the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon, credits her early exposure to tech in Mr. Wong’s class for sparking her career in generative AI for use in project-based and hands-on learning.
Multidisciplinary Approaches and Real-World Dilemmas
In 2018 Wong and his students tested and implemented a drone lab – a project that Aher was involved with – for one of Burlington’s ELL physics classes when mini-drones were relatively novel. The help-desk students and Wong helped the physics class download necessary apps and demonstrated drone usage.
Multidisciplinary approaches to learning, like the physics drone lab, not only allow for meaningful connections between students, but also provide an opportunity for real world work, said Wong.
In 2016 Sean Musselman, a K-5 science and social studies specialist for Burlington School District, was developing a new earth surface and landforms unit. The new unit included a field trip to Massachusetts’ Plum Islands, an ecosystem experiencing significant erosion. However, Musselman needed to find a supplemental at-school interactive activity because the field trip had limited capacity.
Inspired by UC Davis’s augmented reality sandbox, presented at the National Science Teachers Association Conference in 2016, Mussleman proposed that one of Wong’s students build a portable version for use across the district. Edmund Reis, a high school student at the time, was on board.
Guided by instructions published by UC Davis and with support from Wong and Musselman, Reis built a portable AR sandbox from scratch. This included building the computer, installing the operating system and adapting the source code.
For Reis, who now works in tech, the trial and error of building the AR sandbox as a teen helped him to develop important creative and collaborative skills that he’s used both in higher education and in his professional life.
Climate Literacy for Young Learners
Designed to educate second graders about watersheds and interconnected geography, the portable AR sandbox provided an engaging alternative to the Plum Islands field trip. The AR sandbox helped the district’s second graders to understand the impacts of water systems in a world that is increasingly affected by climate change.
Today, because of fallout from the pandemic, the students no longer go on the field trip, but the AR sandbox lessons have remained.
In groups of about seven students, Musselman conducts a 15-minute lesson with the AR sandbox. During these lessons, the students develop a foundational awareness of general climate and their surrounding environment.
The AR sandbox provides “a really wonderful visual, interactive, dynamic model for [students] to explore and ask questions,” said Musselman.
Students are given an opportunity to build their own landscape and place monopoly houses in the sandbox. Rain is then simulated, and students watch as erosion manipulates their landscape. “They would see their houses tumble, which is exactly what’s happening in Plum Island,” said Musselman.
“There is not a student that isn’t completely enraptured with what is taking place at that table,” Musselman continued. “It’s 100% engagement.”
Students walk away from these lessons with greater climate literacy and understanding of how climate can impact their own environment. Musselman makes sure to explain to the second graders that scientists use models like the AR sandbox to understand weather impacts and climate change. And that understanding from the AR sandbox was enabled by exposing a high school student to the benefits of providing tech support and having agency over their learning.
