At first glance, St. Margaret's Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California, looks like many other traditional K-12 college-prep private schools, right down to the tartan-accented uniforms. After school in the quad, cheerleaders run through routines and football players prep for practice, but on the far side of Highland Quad, a group of 9- and 10-year-olds are logging into their Microsoft Surface Pro 4s, sharing CAD files for solar-powered light sources, and participating in video-based engineering brainstorms with students in Honduras.
Welcome to the global classroom. Students here are expanding their horizons via the Global Inventors' Course from Level Up Village; a "Take a Class, Give a Class" social enterprise model. Over 150 US schools have collaborated with more than 30 organizations and schools in over 20 countries. Since 2012, approximately 11,000 students worldwide have gone through Level Up Village's global STEAM programs.
St. Margaret's partnered with the Honduras Child Alliance. PCMag got a permission slip to sit in on David Beshk's after-school class to find out more.
Obviously, conditions in the small beachside community of El Porvenir are an economic and cultural chasm away from wealthy Southern California. But one young St. Margaret's student told PCMag that "We can see how their lives are very different to ours, and that's important—for instance, some of them don't have electricity at home. But it's really cool to get to know them—and I like working on this project, talking about 3D printing and designing stuff, with students in another country."
As Amy McCooe, Level Up Village CEO and co-founder, explained via email, "We provide the tech, the training, the curriculum, and the connections...that prepare them to become the next generation of compassionate global citizens."
Back in the classroom, Mr. Beshk calls for "Quiet on set, please." Then, while several students rehearse this week's video questions to share with their Honduran counterparts, others lean closer into their screens, open up Tinkercad and figure out what's next in the project—developing a solar-powered flashlight—like where the wires will go to connect up the miniature solar power source.
We are joined by Dr. Jeneen Graham, Academic Dean. "I approved the program because I was very interested in the combination of understanding the usefulness and impact of technology, as well as our students acquiring new learning skills, while getting to communicate with our global community more effectively," she said.
Mr. Beshk is a fifth-grade teacher and Lower School Dean of Students; he also directs St. Margaret's summer STEM programs.
"We first watched a video on Honduras to gain a working understanding of their culture, and did a slow zoom in from Google Earth to show the relationship between us, in San Juan Capistrano, and our partner school in Central America," Beshk told PCMag. "Then our students got paired off, and we progressed to the energy portion of the course. Our students were really surprised to learn that Honduras is a major hydroelectric producing country as well as one of the world's leading wind farm generators."
However, as the St. Margaret's students found out, those in rural areas have low or no access to power. That's why, for the final project in the course, they get hands on and geeky—and students in California and Honduras get to keep their flashlights.
It's worth noting that there are lots of well-equipped US private schools with state-of-the-art 21st century computer labs, VR headsets, and 3D printers. What's innovative about what St Margaret's are doing, under the aegis of Level Up Village, is ensuring the expertise is spread across the globe.
For those wondering, privacy is strictly maintained; first names only with initial to denote surname, while video recordings and replay are supervised. Those restrictions do not appear to have dampened creativity. While shadowing Mr. Beshk, we stopped to admire a 3D-printed creation on one 9-year-old's desk.
The student took off his headphones, paused the video replay of his counterpart in Central America, and shrugged modestly. "Yeah, I like 3D printing," he said. "I made a Death Star over the summer vacation."
A whole Death Star?"Yeah," he said, clearly wanting to get back to the video and exchange the latest CAD files with the boy waiting in Honduras to pick up the slack. "But this is really cool too," he said, pointing at the laptop screen.
It was a fitting endorsement that the global classroom has arrived.