Teacher Workshops
STEAMpunk Adventures
Around YOUR World in Half A Day
Are you looking for ways to provide differentiation without the extra work? Or maybe you struggle to find programs with integration that link easily to the curriculum?
STEAMpunk Adventures is a design thinking program framework that can be tailored for any classroom. We provide template workbooks and curriculum linked lesson plans with samples.
The half day workshops help teachers and learning leads to discover how they can use STEAMpunk Adventures to set up their school and classrooms to inspire STEM interest and awareness.
Teachers are encouraged to participate and observe students in a real-life experience of how the STEAMpunk Adventures could work at their school.
The programs & workshops give participants the freedom to explore the world around them as a team through guided activities. This exposes them to design thinking, PBL, IBL, flipped classrooms, and sets up for integrated, differentiated learning linked to the curriculum.
Leading with Arts and Humanities with focus on real-world problems we look at STEM through a different lens to create the STEAM required to power our future.
Ideal for students years four to nine, and can be tailored for any school age.
Delivered in collaboration with:
Want to hear more about STEAMpunk Adventures and our workshops?
Check out some past project pitches!
So much fun in just EIGHT lessons!!!
I cannot believe what these teams were able to achieve in just 8 lessons as part of our inaugural pilot competition in conjunction with National Science Week Australia in 2020. To be honest, I don't think they quite believed what they did either. I am so proud of them.
Three of the teams were from a blended class of mainstream and EALD students in a primary school in Australia. One team was secondary school students from Malawi, Africa.
STEAMpunk Adventures can be tailored for any length and cohort, and we provide a framework and samples to help you map to your curriculum and learning areas.
Program Outline for Students
Calling all creators, technologists & inventors!
STEAMpunk is an inspired movement of creativity and imagination. Use clothing, props & technology in new and unique ways to explore & change your future (or past). Present your ideas and inventions using art, film, writing, images, audio or other media.
The WHY
In our world today, it is hard to imagine how we would survive without technology. And to figure out what we can do to improve the outcomes.
We invite you to come with us on an adventure to learn more about how human intelligence and technology intersect and interact. What is the right balance? Is there a right balance? Where do arts, creativity and other 21st Century skills fit in.
Some people feel a bit lost and don’t understand STEM or technology. Let’s explore and have some fun with STEAMpunk.
The WHAT
Explore your theme and the brief to identify a problem you want to solve. Can you align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?
Work with your team to empathise with the user, define your design challenge and come up with a solution that you can pitch at the end of the workshop. As a team, tap into your superpowers and decide who does what.
Come up with ideas & inventions to solve your challenge. Use your imagination, change things around, add seemingly unrelated information and props. Does that make for a better world?
Have fun pitching your team’s ideas and inventions.
The WHO
We believe this program will be most fun for students in years 5 to 8, but can be tailored for any age group.
Adults. e.g. parents, teachers, teaching assistants, youth workers, can participate to help guide, but are asked to allow the students to work independently.
The only rule is that the young people are given free rein to invent and explore together, come up with inventions and to present their journey in any way that they see fit… drawings, story telling, audio, interviews, video, images, an essay, song and dance… their preferred method of expression as a team.
The WHEN
The face-to-face teacher workshops will be available for teachers and students at select schools during school terms in Western Australia starting in Term 1 2021.
Each workshop will be standalone session where both teachers and students work in teams to solve problems related to the theme for the specific workshop.
Teachers will be invited to follow-up online sessions to further evolve and tailor the experience for their needs.
The workshops can be tailored for other formats and we are planning to set up an online version.
Contact us for more information.
The HOW
It’s a fairly simple process
- Explore the predefined theme and material for a problem
- Set up team and agree on roles
- Define your design challenge
- Invent & design solution(s)
- Present your invention
The presentation or pitch will be run as a fun type of competition. There are no wrong or right answers. This is exploratory and we look forward to seeing how you map out this journey and present it.
We have no doubt that you will have fun and come up with plenty of ideas, but to help you along the way, we will provide a suggested approach, guiding questions and samples every day.
All you need is LOW-TECH
Think you need advanced tech to participate? Think again.
We want everyone to be able to enjoy this, so the only thing you need is an email address and one device per team so you can participate online and do your research. We will be suggesting a couple of easy to use digital platforms, but they are not mandatory.
What you will need is:
- Can-do attitude
- Collaborative team
- Creativity & critical thinking
- Communication skills
- Paper, post-it notes
Program Resources
Information for Teachers
The following gives an outline of how the workshop works. The objective is to provide teachers with another tool in their toolbelt for providing differentiated, integrated learning that is easily linked to the curriculum for a learning level.
- Teacher briefing online session (will provide videos too)
- Student survey for passion areas so I can assign to teams
- 9:00-9:10: Icebreaker activity: Speed-pitching – 30s pitch of a challenge you want to solve
- 9:10-9:20: Design thinking basics
- 9:20-9:50: Guided activities to research problems and identify/define the design challenge
- 9:50-10:00: MINI BREAK (I expect that the teams will continue to work through and will provide some fruit snacks and water)
- 10:00-10:50: Guided practical activities for:
- Understanding the importance of empathy when designing
- Selecting research and design approaches that give quick results
- Telling stories and presenting
- 11:00-11:10: MINI BREAK (teams may work through – snacks and water provided)
- 11:10-11:40: Pitch frenzy – 3-minute pitch where each team gets to pitch and cover
- the problem or challenge they are solving
- what they discovered
- their top 3 ideas
- their preferred invention/solution
- feedback collected about their invention
- how they worked together
- recommended steps for team
- 11:40-12:00: Time to reflect (students and teachers will be separated)
- 12:00-12:20: Share findings from each reflection session with 1-2 reps from each group
- 12:20-12:30: Wrap up with a commitment to actions from reflection sessions
- 2 x online sessions for the teachers to collaborate and reflect, refine and apply at their school
Want to hear more about STEAMpunk Adventures and our workshops?
Why STEAMpunk?
STEAMpunk is an inspired movement of creativity and imagination, where people use clothing, props and technology in novel and original ways. It invites images of the Victorian era and the Wild West, ideas of fascinating machines and fanciful costumes, etiquette and wit, playfulness and adventure.
It is a wonderful backdrop for inspiring youth to develop research skills, learn about history, engage in collaboration, and gain numerous other essential skills for 21st century learning.
STEAMpunk incorporates ideas such as retro-futurism and anachronisms. It imagines certain discoveries never happened and impossible or unknown inventions exist. It dresses up gadgets and makes them fashionable, it runs with illogical designs, and invites creativity and play. Technology as we know it progresses in a logical way, with each discovery building on previous discoveries. But what would happen if something changed – what would the impact be on future discoveries and events?
Books and movies have expanded on these ideas, with a fascination in machines, gadgets and weaponry, that are innovative, creative and out of this world! These classics include The Golden Compass, Back to the Future, BladeRunner, Dr. Who, Studio Ghibli films, and Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne. Verne’s novels are often called the earliest versions of STEAMpunk literature. They imagine different pasts and futures than the ones we have experienced. They contain a spirit of discovery and adventure, with an individualistic “can-do” attitude, and a belief that anyone can do anything with enough science and nerve.
By playing with these ideas, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of technology, learning about cause and effect, and adding creativity and imagination, we will have a fun and accessible journey of learning and discovery. We will offer opportunities to see the benefits and shortcomings of technology and create innovative solutions that harness the best qualities in humans and technology, through inventive projects, daily check-ins, and powerful questions to stimulate ideas. We will be the heros in our own STEAMpunk adventure!
There are unlimited possibilities for creating new futures, innovative technologies and funky fashions while learning important skills for 21st century learning.
Want to hear more about STEAMpunk Adventures and our workshops?
Rules of Engagement
1. Organiser
The program is being run by STEAM Engine Global, a social enterprise that aims to bridge the gap and develop career pathways for disadvantaged population groups. Part of the challenge is that a lot of young people feel disengaged and alienated in a world underpinned by technology. The goal is to inspire, enable and empower the learners through bringing in 21st Century skills, global citizenship and experiential learning in a fun, personalised project-based learning environment where the learners have agency in their own learning through relevance and choice.
2. The Program
“Around YOUR World in Half a Day” is an introductory workshop for teachers and students to demonstrate how ideas and concepts from the STEAMpunk Movement can be applied to create an engaging, experiential learning environment in the classroom. The STEAMpunk Adventures Series is a series of affordable, low-tech, blended programs inspired by the STEAMpunk movement. Participants are encouraged to think outside the box and not be limited by time and space while they explore the interaction between human skills and technology, Arts and STEM in their own world and try to come up with “inventions” that can improve the outcomes.
3. Program Dates
The teacher workshops will be run face-to-face through participating schools during Western Australian School term time starting in Term 1 2021.
Classroom programs can be run individually at schools, and will be available online as packages for a specific age group, and can also be tailored for specific needs.
We are planning to run inter school competitions in 2021.
4. What will Teachers and Students Get out of the Workshop
The workshop provides teachers with an opportunity to experience a real-time short version of STEAMpunk Adventures themselves, share experiences and reflections with other teachers and observe students’ experiential learning and reflections to help discover how the classroom programs could work for their school.
Teachers will also be provided with draft workbooks, sample curriculum mapping, cheat sheets and program structure that can be used in the classroom.
5. What will Students Get out of the Classroom Program
All students will participate in real-world experiential learning inspired by Design Thinking, which develops 21st Century Skills and fosters Global Citizenship, which can be applied to any future learning.
Each participant will be provided with a certificate for their participation, digital copies of cheat sheets, templates and references, a digital team workbook and a STEAMpunk Adventures gift.
We are planning a global STEAMpunk Adventures online competition. Participating teams will be eligible to apply to pitch either in person or by submitting a video pitch.
The teams will have an option to be featured on the STEAMpunk Adventures podcast.
6. Teams and registration
- The workshop is open to teachers who may bring up to 4 students
- Students will be allocated into teams a week prior to the workshop
- Teachers will be allocated into teacher teams a week prior to the workshop
- All participants will be provided with a theme and material relating to that theme a week before the workshop
- Each team team will consist of 4-5 members
7. Purpose of collection of information
STEAM Engine Global Pty Ltd collects personal information only as part of the entry in order to conduct the competition.
By submitting an entry, entrants agree that the STEAM Engine Global may, for an indefinite period, unless otherwise advised, use the personal information collected from the entry for promotional, marketing and publicity purposes for the competition, for internet posts and/or for future communication.
Details are documented in our Privacy Policy.
Upcoming Workshops
John Curtin College of the Arts
We are delighted to announce that we are planning to run a workshop in collaboration with STEM4Innovation and John Curtin College of the Arts on Friday 11 June 9am-12:30pm.
There is limited capacity, so please contact us as soon as possible if you are interested.
In collaboration with:
Printable Flyer
To make it easy to take away and discuss, we have created a brief flyer that covers the basic points.
Would you like to learn more about STEAMpunk Adventures or participate in the workshop?
If you want to hear, want to participate in a workshop, or are interested in running a similar workshop or other STEAMpunk Adventures initatives at your school, please contact us to explore if we can make it happen.
Find out more
If you need some more information before you make up your mind, let’s start with a conversation.
Contact Info
Perth, Western Australia
steampunk@steamengine.global