STEAM Designs: Survival!

This workshop engages teachers in designing STEAM-based lessons around survival scenarios, integrating science, technology, engineering, arts, and math with real-world challenges. Participants explore survival themes such as weather emergencies, accessing clean water, building shelter, making fire, and navigation, while also connecting literacy and career readiness skills. The session emphasizes inquiry, collaboration, and problem-based learning, showing how survival contexts can foster creativity, critical thinking, and perseverance. By incorporating authentic experiences, teachers learn to make content both rigorous and meaningful for students.

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• Traditional instruction that isolates content areas instead of fostering integrated, real-world problem-solving.
  
  
• Limited opportunities for students to apply survival skills and critical thinking to authentic, cross-disciplinary challenges.
  
  
• Lack of student engagement and relevance when lessons feel disconnected from practical life skills and real-world applications.

1. Designing Integrated STEAM Survival Challenges: Participants will learn how to structure survival-themed lessons (e.g., hurricanes, outdoor survival, water access) that connect multiple standards and provide open-ended problem-solving opportunities.
   
   
2. Promoting Critical Thinking and Resilience: Teachers will develop strategies to guide students in analyzing survival scenarios, making informed decisions, and persevering through complex challenges while understanding environmental, social, and economic impacts.
   
   
3. Building Literacy and Career Connections: Educators will explore ways to integrate reading, writing, and reflection into STEAM survival lessons, while also highlighting connections to real-world careers like meteorology and emergency management.