STEM Summer Institute 2026

This session explores how NotebookLM can serve as a reliable, teacher‑curated knowledge hub in STEM classrooms where students often struggle with attention during lectures and face increasing risks of misinformation from open‑ended AI tools. By consolidating vetted articles, datasets, and reference materials into a single notebook, teachers can limit unreliable sources while giving students a safe space to verify concepts and support their lab investigations. The approach reduces the need for heavy lecture and note‑taking, allowing more time for hands‑on, inquiry‑driven activities while ensuring students build understanding from accurate, intentional resources.

In this session, I will discuss the ways that I brought Ethnobotany into the middle school classroom. Through an immersion course, which is very simple to implement in any middle school science classroom, I intertwined culturally significant plants with bacterial research. In this session, we will discuss how we took traditionally sacred plants (sagebrush & yarrow) and tested them against bacterial growth. Students were able to participate in data collection to support traditional medicinal plant uses. In this session, I will discuss how this course can be implemented in any classroom setting. The plants used for this course had cultural significance to the Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes, but can be adapted to any tribe in Montana. Main takeaways- allows students to connect culturally to their ancestors, easy implementation of ethnobotany, and meets IEFA standards.

Effective STEM-based lessons can start with natural math/science integration to discover more about the world around us. In this hands-on, inquiry-based workshop, participants will engage in innovative activities that illustrate the science and math behind real-world ecology concepts such as carrying capacity in nature, natural resource use, and how humans are forever changing Earth’s landscape, habitats and biodiversity. Presented strategies include creating representational mathematical models with manipulatives, cooperative group problem-solving challenges, graphing and analysis, and role-playing simulations. The presented activities build students' understanding and skills in algebraic patterns and functions, decimals, fractions and ratios, linear measurement, number operations, collaborative problem solving, and scientific inquiry. The activities incorporate data on trends in the environment, global demographics and natural resource use, and seek to enhance their data literacy and critical thinking skills related to data. Manipulatives are used to illustrate concepts for visual learners. Participants will receive lesson plans and background materials all matched to Montana K-12 Content Standards for several disciplines.

Students engaging in the scientific method requires authentic engagement, real collaboration, and rigorous debate about the data students have collected for themselves and for their team. This workshop will show teachers how to give their students the agency to practice science and assume responsibility for conducting it together. Whether contributing to existing theory or revolutionizing a paradigm, consensus-building is the necessary social skill that science demands of students. In this workshop, we will practice two consensus-building protocols that will shift the ownership of learning from you back to your students. You will walk away with a framework for lesson development that saves you time and energy, practical tools to help you implement this strategy within your existing curriculum, and a ready-to-use physics unit on waves. Make your students smarter, your workload smaller, and your instruction more effective than ever.

In this session, we will engage in a learner-centered approach to developing scientific principles through data. Participants will work together to build a model of a phenomenon that they observe through videos and experimental apparatus. We will conclude by looking at student data from their engagement in a similar activity. We will discuss how “pedagogical tools” can be used to facilitate knowledge construction in the classroom using science and engineering practices.

How can hands-on STEM experiences translate into sustained career pathways? This session highlights findings from MSUB's pilot Drone STEM Camps, immersive week-long programs serving middle and high school students. Participants built and soldered drones, learned flight operations and FAA safety fundamentals. In our second year, students will apply aerial imagery to authentic regional challenges, connecting engineering design and geospatial analysis to workforce-relevant problem solving. Evaluation data from the pilot indicate increases in student STEM interest, confidence with technical skills, and awareness of aerospace and advanced manufacturing careers. The session will share instructional strategies for integrating drone manufacturing, electrical soldering, flight, and spatial analysis into classroom or informal STEM settings. It will also outline how these camps are being intentionally aligned with Career and Technical Education (CTE) frameworks, community and tribal college pathways, and industry partnerships. Participants will leave with practical models for developing workforce-aligned STEM programming that strengthens career identity, builds technical skills, and connects students to emerging aerospace and geospatial opportunities in Montana and beyond.