It is the Friday afternoon before Halloween, and the kids in Mimi Fong's fifth grade class are anxious to get their candy. To get it, though, they must build bulldozers out of Legos.
With the supervision of two Tufts students, kids at the Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Boston are constructing motorized bulldozers with which they will scoop up as much candy as possible from a small pile on the floor.
The students - juniors Joe Weidenbach and Nate Zamarripa - are part of the Student Teacher Outreach Mentorship Program (STOMP), run by Tufts' Center for Engineering Education Outreach.
Started four years ago by Tufts alumna Merredith Portsmore (LA '98, G '99), STOMP sends students into area classrooms to run hands-on activities that teach basic principles of engineering. Some of these activities involve Legos and Lego Robotics.
"Our mission is to get engineering into K-12," said Portsmore. "It's obviously really hard for these teachers to do these amazing hands-on activities with one teacher to 30 kids."
In addition, to Josiah Quicy, STOMP sends students to between eight and 12 other elementary schools each year, including ones in Medford and Somerville.
STOMP specifically wants to encourage young girls to get interested in engineering. Fong said that goal is certainly being accomplished. "There are always a handful of girls who are intimidated by building, and by the end of the program, they're not," she said. "I think that this program helps to move girls towards the sciences."
Much of the Lego technology STOMP uses was developed by another of the center's educational outreach programs, the Robolab.
STOMP's programs are not limited to Lego Robotics, though. "At a younger age, we teach 'What are sturdy structures?'" senior Kaitlyn Conroy, a senior and member of STOMP's student executive board, said. "Then we move into more advanced topics like gear ratios."
STOMP activities also incorporate subjects other than engineering. One lesson plan ties social studies into science by explaining the engineering principles behind the pyramids of Egypt.
Each STOMP team, usually made up of two Tufts students, designs their own classroom activities. At the weekly executive board meetings, members bounce ideas off of each other and discuss which activities work better than others.
Weidenbach and Zamarripa came up with the bulldozer activity to bring some Halloween spirit into their classroom. They constructed a two-by-two foot square of blue electric tape on the tiled floor and scattered approximately fifty Jolly Ranchers inside the tape.
The students got to keep as much candy as their bulldozer plowed from the square but had to forfeit one quarter of that loot if their machine fell apart while crossing the floor. The elementary school students worked in pairs of two to construct the bulldozers.
"We're trying to make the plow as big as possible to scoop up the most candy," ten-year-old Dorothy Tran said as she worked on the bulldozer with her partner Betty Yu.
"I think the hardest thing is the plow, because it always comes off after the test drive," Yu said.
The most Jolly Ranchers collected by any one bulldozer was 40. Weidenbach and Zamarripa then helped the students analyze what made specific designs more successful than others.
"[These students] designed their plow to maximize the square's potential," Weidenbach said of the group that won. He pointed out that the plow was created to be almost as long as the width of the square.
According to the STOMP Web site, half of the Tufts students that travel to elementary schools must be female. These students must also take part in bi-monthly seminars that discuss teaching and classroom issues.
The program is gaining momentum, as shown by the record number of applicants this fall. Sophomore and second year STOMP member Michelle Marques said the increase in interest forced STOMP to reject some applicants for the first time.
"This year, for some reason, tons of people came to our first meeting," Marques said. "We work on a grant, so we don't have enough to pay everyone's salary."
STOMP members typically work between four and eight hours a week and earn $10 an hour.
Those involved with the program are trying to spread it to other schools. A few STOMP members went to the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Conference, which took place in June in Portland, Ore., to share their experiences with other educators.
"We've created...manuals explaining how you would [implement a similar program]," Conroy said.
The executive board is also working with a high school teacher in New Hampshire who wants to start a high school equivalent of STOMP. He wants to send his students into elementary schools.
Josiah Quincy, where Zamarripa and Weidenbach go every week, is located in Chinatown, near Tufts' Boston campus. "Our first commitment is to work with the Tufts community," Portsmore said.
According to Fong, the students in her class eagerly anticipate the Friday Lego time. "They absolutely adore this program," she said. As 12:30 draws near on Fridays, Fong said, her students start to ask when the Legos are coming out.
Yu, one of the fifth graders working on the bulldozer project, agreed that this is always a fun part of the week. "It makes you think a lot, use your brain a lot," she said.
