Genius Hour

CHATHAM  Lily Bogardus and her fellow fourth- and fifth-graders at St. Patrick School here made a fascinating discovery, after testing out a new toy — a plastic frog game — that they created on the school’s pre-k to eighth-grade student population: the younger children were able to master the game more quickly than the older children.

During the last academic year, Bogardus, now a St. Patrick’s fifth-grader, led one of the teams of fourth- and fifth-graders that collaborated to research, design and build a toy specifically for pre-school students. The students made a game that challenged players to throw a series of plastic frogs that had on their backs stickers with various shapes, such as circles and triangles, and get them to land in the correct buckets that displayed the corresponding shapes. They created the plastic frogs with a 3-D printer.

Last school year, fourth- and fifth-graders joined students at every grade level in St. Patrick School in creating different toys and games for young children, the disabled and the elderly, as part of the school’s Genius Hour. The program sparks creative problem solving in all students at all levels and of all abilities by enabling them to grapple with engineering and design challenges with real-world applications. Students also learn how their projects fit in with the Catholic mission of the school, said Christine Ross, principal of St. Patrick’s, one of only four Catholic elementary schools in the nation to achieve STEM certification from preschool through Grade 8 from AdvancED, a national school accrediting agency and be a U.S. National Blue Ribbon School.

“The frog game came out well. It helps pre-school kids develop their fine and gross motor skills,” said Bogardus, who proposed the idea of placing different shapes on the frogs and corresponding buckets. St. Patrick’s Genius Hour also seeks to inspire students to consider a career in a STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] field — perfect for Bogardus. “I want to become an astronaut and do experiments on a spaceship, when I grow up,” she said.

Bogardus was one of the students chosen to speak about St. Patrick’s Genius Hour during the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) New Directions STREAM [Science, Technology, Religion, Engineering, Arts and Math] 3.0 Conference in Parsippany. Small teams of students from six diocesan schools, including St. Patrick’s, made presentations of STREAM projects. The Diocese partnered with the Newark Archdiocese to co-host the national conference with the NCEA.

At the conference, Ross led a presentation about Genius Hour at St. Patrick’s. Assisting Ross were Caitlin Dickinson, a transitional kindergarten teacher, and Alexandria Maggio, fourth- to sixth-grade science teacher.

“Genius Hour gives our students the ability to take real-world problems and solve them in their own terms and through the eyes of our Catholic faith — how God wants us to look at the world. The Lord wants us to take care of his creation, including his people. Our students can take the skills that they learn by doing these projects and apply them to whatever career that they ultimately pursue,” Ross told The Beacon. “Genius Hour also is an opportunity for our students to have a voice — to think critically and be creative. It’s an awesome process to watch,” she said.

Mary Baier, Diocesan schools superintendent, said, “The continued work of our Catholic schools and at St. Patrick School is evidence that our mission for Catholic education is supported and lived.”

Now in its third year, Genius Hour inspired St. Patrick’s students in its first year to fulfill the theme of “Doing Something Beautiful for God” by developing projects to combat global climate change. Projects included a home designed and landscaped to be fire resistant, a way to save trees by creating soybean paper and a wellness program that had an emphasis on nutrition and gardening. Last year, grades in clusters of two each researched, designed and built toys and games, under the theme “Be a Blessing for Others.” For this coming school year, the theme will be “Create Caring Moments” with students tackling the problem of how to deal with plastic waste, Ross said.

Each year, the process begins with St. Patrick’s staff picking a religious theme and a specific type of STEM problem to solve. The grade levels are divided into “bands” with the formation of smaller teams of students each to collaborate on the projects. They conduct extensive research. For the toys, students talked to teachers, including pre-k, kindergarten and special education; physical and occupational therapists; and nursing home staff. They designed several toys, including those that rolled and floated, helped develop motor skills or served a specific population of disabled people, such as the blind or those with Down syndrome. They also developed advertising and marketing campaigns to promote the toys, Ross said.

Genius Hour adopts a cross-curricular approach — encouraging students to use their knowledge and skills of other subjects, such as social studies, language arts and religion, in their projects and to work on their projects in classes of other subjects. Educators should teach students to “embrace failure” — that not every attempt at a project will be a success and that they can learn from those failures. St. Patrick’s teachers learned to suggest more “structured” project ideas to the younger students, whereas they could be more “open-ended” with older students. Throughout the process, a “buddy” program enables younger students to ask older students for help, Maggio said.

“Genius Hour fosters in our students’ creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication,” Maggio said. “It’s critical that students honor the past of St. Patrick’s and the 2,000-year history of Catholicism but we at the school also must propel our students forward, preparing them for their careers, some of which don’t exist yet,” she said.