Beyond the anticipation of trick-or-treating and feverish costume planning, the Halloween season presents an opportunity to bring festive magic into your classrooms. Teachers can tap into students' enthusiasm for this particular holiday with these spooky STEM activities! When students are excited about what they are doing in class, they're more likely to be actively engaged. Plus, connecting STEAM concepts to the real-world fun of Halloween helps children understand the practical applications of the lesson. Keep scrolling and you'll discover some truly fun STEAM projects with a Halloween twist!
A micro:bit Halloween house
The micro:bit's programmable LEDs are easy to make into animated designs using block or text coding. Students can create an animated ghost, bat, or skull icon to flash between different images in a sequence. To do so, they'll use loops—one of the foundational logic functions of coding. For an extra spooky effect, students could try the micro:bit nightlight project to trigger those icons to turn on when it gets dark. In this project, an infinite loop tells the micro:bit's light sensor to continually monitor its surrounding light levels. If the light level falls below a certain threshold, a conditional instruction in their code instructs the micro:bit to illuminate its LEDs! Once it gets dark enough, the micro:bit can add to your Halloween vibe with ghostly glowing images. After that, check out this full list of micro:bit Halloween projects.
Trick or treat in style with these MakeDo inventions
Not looking forward to buying an elaborate costume that kids will grow out of after one use? Cardboard is the perfect material with which to make a trick-or-treat basket or a custom outfit. With only its safety saws and plastic "scrus," the MakeDo system helps expand the potential of a simple piece of cardboard. Plus, it's recyclable, so your costume won't sit in the back of the closet collecting dust. The MakeDo team has plenty of fun ideas for costumes, like a lion mask, a witch's hat and broom, a full robot outfit, or even a Batman getup! Or, kids might create a pumpkin-shaped candy holder for trick-or-treating. As they make their costumes, they'll develop some new STEAM skills like design thinking and engineering, and they even get to learn the importance of using sustainable materials.
Spooky doodles with the 3Doodler pens
Drawing with 3D pens creates the perfect opportunity to add customizable accessories to any Halloween costume or increase your classroom's creep factor (in a kid-friendly way, of course). The 3Doodler team's even provided several tutorials specifically for making Halloween creations, which you can find here. Kids can start out by drawing a life-sized bat with a stencil as a guide. Then, for extra STEAM power, they could learn all about the anatomy, life cycles, or habitats of bats at the same time! Or, they might doodle a ghost figure over a paper towel mold while learning about the process of mass production. Finally, perhaps your students will make their own 3D candy rings, customized to fit their own finger. During that lesson, they'll learn to accurately measure an object and then use those measurements to create intricate designs.
Ozobot trick-or-treat adventure
The Ozobot Evo's ability to respond to color codes comes in handy for teaching coding fundamentals like cause and effect. But it will also work great for holiday-themed projects. In this Halloween activity, students will fill in a neighborhood map with color codes telling their Ozobot where to go. As it navigates the map, it will collect candy points at every house it passes. Then, at the end, students can add up their candy points to earn a prize! To plan out a route for collecting as much candy as possible, students will have to use their problem-solving and spatial awareness skills when directing their Ozobot. Teachers can download the full lesson plan on the Ozobot Classroom platform.
Get in the Halloween spirit with the Makey Makey
The famous Makey Makey banana piano project isn't limited to one type of fruit. Children can also hook up the Makey Makey to a soundboard of nine pumpkins and their computer, then touch each pumpkin to play a different sound. They could use the Makey Makey Halloween Sampler soundboard or choose their own spooky sound. Other Halloween projects with the Makey Makey board involve students controlling a string of pumpkin lights or playing with an interactive autumn storybook! Always one of the most popular EdTech tools for teaching a variety of STEAM concepts, the Makey Makey also works with electronics or circuitry projects and coding lessons. You can see the full list of Makey Makey Halloween activities on their site.
Welcome students to a haunted classroom with Glowforge designs
Glowforge's 3D laser printers with cutting and engraving capabilities are perfect for outfitting your house or classroom with Halloween decor. Kids could start by making a haunted house diorama that includes a graveyard with miniature headstones, glowing windows, and a broken-down roof. You'll only need wood and acrylic to finish the house, though you could also choose to enhance your scenes with dried ice fog or LED lights. Alternatively, you might make spiderweb cutouts, a witch hat, or an ominous sign to greet kids at your classroom door. By enlisting students' help with festive decorations, you can incorporate relevant lessons or classroom jokes while fostering their design abilities.
Take a trip to eerie locales in VR
RobotLAB's VR Expeditions kits come with over 800 VR field trip destinations, immersing students in 3D panoramas with famous buildings, popular cities, and unfamiliar environments. Many of these Expeditions can even be connected to Halloween—especially those with history or social studies themes. You can take students to the ruins of old castles, like the medieval remains of Goodrich Castle in England. They can also explore the Tower of London, with its spooky history and rumors of ghosts. Plus, they might not realize that Halloween originated in an ancient Celtic festival called Samhain, which marked the end of harvest, so your students could virtually visit some Irish locations to learn more about the real history of the holiday.
Happy Hallow-STEAM!
Whether you are celebrating Halloween with low-tech maker tools or high-tech robots, we hope these fun activities leave you bubbling with some added holiday anticipation. These hands-on projects span multiple subjects, like engineering, art, and history, helping you create cross-disciplinary learning experiences. As students explore these memorable lessons, they'll create positive associations with STEAM and walk away with some new real-world skills. Happy Halloween, and may your classrooms truly be filled with the kind of learning that leaves everyone spellbound!
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