The STEM room at Jordan Hills Elementary School is full of boxes of building materials, posters explaining construction techniques and a variety of toys and tools used for exploring science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

STEM teachers Susan Smith and Marijane Smith have been steadily adding materials to their classroom supplies to provide a variety of experiences to engage students.

“[Former Principal] Michelle Lovell started us doing STEM about seven years ago, and we built it up from scratch,” Susan Smith said. “And we, just in the last few years, started working on getting grants like the DonorsChoose, so the community is really what’s paying for all of our equipment.” 

The most recent community donations purchased a classroom set of Breakout Boxes which are similar to an escape room challenge. Students work together in groups to solve puzzles and find clues to give them the combinations to open three locks on a box. When the boxes debuted in early March, the students were thrilled.

“Most of them know about escape rooms, and they love escape rooms, and so doing this kind of gets them that escape room feel, and they love the solving puzzle aspect of it,” Susan Smith said.

Previously, the STEM teachers had to wait their turn to borrow the well-worn Breakout Box activities from the Jordan School District’s lending library. With their own classroom set of boxes and locks, they will be able to utilize them more often with the collection of puzzles available on the Breakout website.

“Our goal is to get them to work together and to be more creative and innovative,” Susan Smith said. 

Students were given clues but few directions on how to begin solving the puzzles to open the three padlocks on the box.

“We had to figure out which locks go to which clue,” Katelyn Brown said.

The activity taught students how to work together, share ideas and cooperate.

“It takes a lot of teamwork and being able to talk to your group, because if we all just go off and do our own thing then we’re trying to fight over each other,” sixth grader Cody Firkins said.

“Communication and teamwork is a really big part of it,” sixth grader Zaylee Spears said.

Students enjoyed the Breakout Boxes. Other favorite STEM class activities have been making marble roller coasters, experimenting with chemistry and programming Spherobots.

“So much STEM nowadays is geared toward the electronic and the coding, and we still like to do the hands-on unplugged stuff,” Susan Smith said.

Marijane Smith enjoys engineering activities that allow students to use their creativity, such as designing a minigolf course hole and creating a contraption to lift a pumpkin. 

“I like the building and designing things where they have to get creative with what we have,” she said. “It’s really fun to see what they can come up with, because they’ll come up with ideas that we don’t necessarily think about when we’re planning it.”

The students were recently tasked with designing a shoe. They spent four weeks sketching and building prototypes. They also came up with a name and logo for their shoe.

“We gave them the task, ‘Can you build a shoe with just the things that we provide for you?’ and mostly it was just cereal boxes and toilet paper rolls and string and just a few odds and ends, and that’s what they came up with, these awesome shoes,” Susan Smith said.

Students said one thing they’ve learned in STEM class is that it is okay to make mistakes, so when they encountered a problem when making their shoe prototype, they didn’t worry about it.

“I messed up a couple times but then I just added on to it,” Makayla Brown said. λ