Results
Mathematics Teacher Case – Nate
Nate cooperated with Kathy to implement his STEM
lesson unit on packaging engineering. His lesson unit
length was one day lasting for 90 minutes. There were
25 students in the class. In the beginning of his class, he
spent 10 minutes introducing the problem: a church in
Europe broke their stained glass window and will buy
their replacement stained glass from the U.S. He told
students that they would be designing packages in Kathy’s
class to ship these stained glass windows to Europe, but
they needed to learn how to measure different shapes of
polygons before they can design their packages. This was
used as a context to motivate the content learning. He said,
‘‘If you (students) don’t know how to measure them (the
polygons), you will not know how to design a package that
can fit them. So, in my class, we are going to work on that
(measuring polygons).’’ Therefore, in his class, he used
STEM integration, particularly engineering integration, as
the context to connect his mathematics teaching with other
STEM disciplines. After that, he spent 15 minutes to show
different stained glass windows and talked about different
shapes of polygons. Then, he gave a handout to his students
and he had demonstrated how to complete the handout
step-by-step. The handout included different measurement
categories, such as number of sides, length of side, perimeter, interior angle, exterior angle of a polygon, and
tessellation. After the demonstration, he gave each student
several different shapes of polygons, and asked students to
complete their handout. He walked around the classroom
and helped students who needed assistance. At the end of
class, he asked students to share their answers and demonstrate how they measured their polygons.