Souderton Charter School Collaborative’s Last Chance Repair Club helps students learn science, math
Some of the things the students in Souderton Charter School Collaborative’s Last Chance Repair Club have worked on include clocks, a CD player, pencil sharpeners and calculators.
“One of the first things they fixed were some dancing snowmen that no longer were dancing or singing,” teacher Jeannine Dunn said. “They soldered some wires and got them back up and running.”
Torn blankets have also been sewn up, she said.
The recently started after-school club, which has 10 students in grades six through eight, helps enhance the students STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills, along with their abilities to collaborate and problem solve, she said.
“This club encourages students to become stewards of the environment — repairing items instead of adding them to landfill sites,” Dunn wrote on the donorchoose.org website, where the more than $500 of donations goal for tools and supplies to fund the project was met in three days.
The funding is through Science Everywhere, a $1 million nationwide campaign by the Overdeck Family Foundation and the Simons Foundation to encourage outside-school and outside-class math and science learning, a campaign spokesperson said. The foundations match donorchoose.org donations from the public.
The idea for the club grew out of seeing a video clip on social media about repair cafes in Sweden, telling her students about it and the students asking to start their own repair cafe, Dunn said.
Information about the club was posted in the school newsletter and people were encouraged to bring things in to be repaired.
“Of course, we make no guarantees on anything,” Dunn said, “but we’re willing to troubleshoot the problem and try to figure it out and do the best we can with trying to solve it.”
Sometimes the students use online videos or other information to learn how to make the repairs, Dunn said. They’ve also sometimes received advice from experts in the community.
The students have also learned by “taking stuff apart and seeing how it works,” she said.
“The kids are so creative,” said fellow-teacher Julie Cook, who with Dunn and Brandon Reichart are the school’s teaching team for grades seven and eight. The three teachers also lead the Last Chance Repair Club.
One of the examples of that creativity came after the initial supplies were received and a supplier emailed to check if the item had arrived and that they were satisfied with it, Dunn said. When she replied, she told him about the club and he offered to send the club discontinued items at no cost.
“We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of items arriving and they’re so random. The first box that we opened was 200 mouse traps,” Dunn said.
At first, she said, she wasn’t sure what to do with the mouse traps, but one of the students took an idea from something they had seen online and suugested taking some parts off the mouse trap, then using the remaining parts as a wall mount from which to hang papers.
The parts that are removed from the mouse trap will be used for wind chimes, Cook said.