How have you developed or demonstrated this competency this semester?
My class, Informal Science Education, has most definitely put my creativity to the test. As we learned from Dr. Grillo, there are many very fun activities we can do with kids, but they mean nothing if there is no learning goal behind them. Designing a lesson plan that teaches while also being fun proved to be more difficult than I thought. Since I am interested in neuroscience, I wanted to create a lesson around the brain, specifically the 4 lobes. I had learned about the brain on my own before coming to college, but this semester, I took my first neuroscience course (Behavioral Neurobiology). We had covered the lobes already by the time I was designing the lesson plan, and the wealth of knowledge we had covered was hard to condense into a few big ideas to include into the lesson plan. Additionally, since most lesson plans revolve around 3 activities and I wanted to do 4, one for each lobe of the brain, I had to constantly think of timing and how many moving pieces would be involved in having 4 different activities. I was able to come up with 4 distinct activities that allowed the kids to move around, play with cool brain-related games, and think about what they learned. One of the more creative activities I came up with was for the temporal lobe, which is important for hearing and memory. I made a memory card game for the kids to play to test their abilities to not only remember the cards but also what we had learned about the different lobes before. It balanced the fun of a game (and a bit of a race for time) and the educational aspects of a lesson.
