Brian Ragatz, president of Edina-based Catholic Schools Center of Excellence, recently received a video from a teacher at Ascension Catholic School in Minneapolis showing elementary school students coding a robot that moved across the classroom and knocked over a bowling pin.
“The best part … wasn’t seeing the pins fall over,” Ragatz said. “It was hearing the kids laughing, hearing the kids give each other high fives and complimenting each other because they did it.”
The students’ learning experience was made possible by a partnership between CSCOE and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul that delivers science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) technology for fun, hands-on projects in any of the 78 elementary schools in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Catholic schools often wed faith to those subjects, creating Catholic-STEM (C-STEM) programs.
Ragatz and Mike Gerard, manager of St. Thomas’ C-STEM lending library, recently joined “Practicing Catholic” host Patrick Conley to describe how it works. The episode debuts at 9 p.m. Jan. 28 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM. The show also airs at 1 p.m. Jan. 29 and 2 p.m. Jan. 30.
Equipment for STEM education can be expensive, Gerard said. Donors at the university and with CSCOE want the most value for their money, so the partnership operates a lending library of materials. “Working with the donors, (we) acquire high-end, expensive, scientific equipment, whether it be virtual reality goggles … or robotics, which help the students learn to code,” Gerard said. “And robots aren’t cheap.”
Technical scientific instruments also are expensive, including high-end microscopes and measuring devices, Gerard said. But those instruments help middle school students “do all kinds of great experiments in the lab with engineering and physics, and get very precise measurements, all the way down into engineering kits, where students go through the design engineering process from beginning to end,” he said.
The lending library helps prevent items from being used once and put on a shelf. The response from students, teachers and others has been “huge,” Ragatz said.
Integrating faith into every classroom, including science, is one of the greatest things about Catholic schools, Ragatz said.
“I do think there’s a misperception that Catholicism is anti-science and Catholic schools are behind the times,” he said. “But really the opposite is true.”
He described science fairs for all archdiocesan Catholic school students in third through eighth grades and a video from an astronaut “just for us” from the International Space Station. The astronaut described his own faith transformation and the many connections between faith and science, Ragatz said. The Society of Catholic Scientists also posted a video “just for us,” Ragatz said, to encourage students to find faith-science connections.
In the end, Ragatz said, the significance of connecting faith and science is “an understanding of purpose.” There’s an understanding of cause and effect, and a mindset of problem identification, solution implementation and learning, he said. Steps students learn in science class can carry to every subject and, really, throughout every aspect of their lives, he said.
Gerard said that the day before the “Practicing Catholic” interview he delivered a kit called “Rockets and Rovers” to a kindergarten class. He recalled seeing the excitement on students’ faces, who knew “something fun was coming.”
“It was these memorable moments where you do something out of the norm that makes the learning stay with the student,” he said.
To learn more about the lending library program, visit cscoe-mn.org/catholic-stem.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes interviews with Yen Fasano and Gayle Stoffel from the archdiocesan Office for the Mission of Catholic Education, who describe how Catholics across the archdiocese celebrate, support and encourage those in Catholic schools; and Nick Brady and Father Jim Livingston from St. Paul in Ham Lake, who discuss that parish’s Next Steps program and its focus on building relationships and community.
Listen to all of the interviews after they have aired at
soundcloud.com/PracticingCatholic
tinyurl.com/PracticingCatholic (Spotify)
