Wheatland Crossing School hosts Skills Alberta workshop

By John Watson Local Journalism initiative Reporter

Wheatland Crossing School once again hosted a Skills Exploration event for their junior high students to explore an introduction to trades and design.

Mark McKeen, one of the teachers at Wheatland Crossing School overseeing the event, said it was the second such event held at the school, following its introduction into the program last year.

“(Skills Alberta) started last year by supplying grants of tool kits to schools, which were essentially a legacy piece. We were able to obtain about $4,000 worth of tools last year,” said McKeen.

“They topped us up this year for a pretty minimal amount and it allowed us to provide more materials and supplement our tools.”

McKeen himself has been involved with operating Skills Alberta events in schools over the past 15 years. 

At Wheatland Crossing, students ranging from grades six through nine were able to participate, equating to roughly 90 students. 

“We pose the challenge to the kids … and they either had to reinvent a sport, invent something like a prototype in terms of assistive technology so someone could play a sport, or essentially try to reimagine something related to sport to make it better,” McKeen explained.

“We set them up into different groups and then they came in, they were able to spend some time planning their prototype and then really hit our shop area and start to build.”

Students were given the entire day to plan, design and construct their prototypes to meet the presented criteria.

At the end of the day, time was allotted for teams to present to their classmates what they had constructed and the thought process behind their invention.

“What we want to do is just celebrate the learning at the end. Because if we make something or we do something but we never really share it, it has a little bit less meaning,” said McKeen.

“I think if you can introduce that concept of putting yourself out there and trying something different to kids, that they’re going to rise to meet that and that’s the beauty of a program like this.”

Following their respective days to build, student creations were set on display throughout the school alongside posters indicating their creative processes.

McKeen added the program isn’t necessarily one that goes off without a hitch, so to speak, but ultimately it provides a unique and immersive learning experience for the kids who participate and it encourages their creative thinking.

“You can see them, you can hear them thinking all day – they might bicker a little bit back and forth, but at the end of it, they really do like what they’ve built, even if they don’t think it looks good,” said McKeen.

“These kids are allowed to take it whichever way they want and I find that if you take away the constraints on kids … they’re allowed to let their imaginations run wild and … they’ll take things in ways that you never even imagined.”

Though there are competitive levels of the program that are taken to the provincial and national scale, Wheatland Crossing School keeps their program localized and fosters the creative, rather than competitive side of the program.