Tucson school helps students create with invention education

Caitlin Schmidt The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, while most were preoccupied with holiday preparation or tying up loose ends at work, a group of Tucson middle schoolers was busy inventing.

This is invention education, and Carden of Tucson, a small charter school on the city's north side, is the first in the state to teach it at every grade level. The curriculum was brought to Carden three years ago by Bri Livingood, the school's assistant director and a middle school teacher. Livingood learned about this type of education while teaching in Massachusetts, and also works as school and community outreach coordinator for Connecticut Invention Convention.

"This just gives students an opportunity to think about everyday life, not just for this project but everything they do in life," Moore said."It's the little things that will make their daily lives that much easier, whether it’s a way to carry pencils in a backpack without breaking them or something else."

"Part of why I love it is because I never saw myself as a science person … but invention education made the engineering and STEM process so accessible to me," Livingood said, referring to science, technology, engineering and math instruction."Because I can identify a problem, I can come up with a solution. But if you tell me to come up with a schematic, and let's look at blueprints and talk about the design process, I got none of that.

Livingood told the class to start by identifying who they want the user of the product to be, then move onto developing something that would be useful for that person. Students had 20 minutes, and while the room was silent for the first few, it soon came alive with energy as they collaborated, shared and challenged one another.

Livingood and Moore also want to share the program with the broader Tucson community in hopes that other parents will want their children to have this experience and schools will want to join in. Carden's invention convention, April's culminating event, will be held at the Southern Arizona Arts and Cultural Alliance's Catalyst space at Tucson Mall.

But the home-based projects allow parents to participate in the learning process, empowering them, she said. Parents will also be involved in the invention process, with all grades except kindergarten set to participate in April's convention.

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