In April, with distance learning really ramping up, our friends with Wonder Workshop announced they'd be hosting a Virtual Summit. Over the span of 10 days, they hosted sessions led by their team, including CEO, Vikas Gupta, and various instructors who have found immense value in using Wonder Workshop’s robotics tools. We were fortunate to be able to sponsor one of the sessions, led by fourth grade teacher, Jasmine Saab, and give away a Wonder Starter Pack to one lucky audience member! The attendee ended up being Imani Malaika-Mehta, who is the executive director of the KC Creators Club in Kansas City and wrote up a special post for us about her experiences with teaching STEM.
This post is by Imani Malaika-Mehta, the Executive Director of STEMS on the VINES and the KC Creators Clubs. She's worked in technology and STEM for many years, including as a network administrator and an afterschool program leader. She's also a member of iNACOL. Here, she shares thoughts on the technology access gap, views on the importance of STEM education, and achieving greater equity.
I have many ambitious students. One student wants to be a chemist, another wants to become a pilot, and some others want to become pediatricians. These students have never seen a microscope, a telescope, or a chemistry lab. When I attended school, these were commonplace, but not so much anymore—and not in every school system or in every part of the county.
One in particular—who wants to be a chemist—snuck out of recreational activities so he could try STEAM sessions. He memorized the Periodic Table and can write the equation for carbolic acid and explain it. This is just one example of how I’ve seen students gravitate towards STEM.
I am the CEO of a STEM nonprofit. We exist to give students opportunities to succeed. Our district has had provisional accreditation for decades and this affects how several generations of children reach grade-level academic proficiency. Students in these low-income neighborhoods have a 40 percent mobility rate due to home evictions. They need to avoid interruptions in their education, including changing schools more than twice per year, which isn't a guarantee.
Estimates revealed that as many as 70 percent of our students do not have Internet access in their homes. During the COVID-19 crisis, many school and district leaders within comparatively affluent school systems were able to access means to continue educational delivery while kids remained at home. Without Internet access and computers, however, many students risk falling further behind and widening the equity gap.
In the US, public school district funding is still based on property taxes, which perpetuates inequality. Your best teachers and resources usually go to those who can pay for them, not to the most gifted children. Tax abatements, such as Tax Increment Financing (TIF) for real estate developers and larger businesses further erodes the tax base, depriving school district leaders of the money they need to pay for the resources and teacher salaries that would pave the way for greater educational equity.
Therefore, people are educated based on their ZIP code, not their aptitude. So, we are losing talent that we could cultivate to help meet the STEM skills shortage as a result. Our STEM organization, however, recently received a Wonder Workshop Starter Pack as a gift from Eduporium. With this generous gift, we'll be better able to provide amazing coding and robotics experiences for Title I students in our programs and all over our city, no matter where they live.
We have a Mobile STEM Lab and bring technology into schools with budgets that often prevent this kind of thing. This helps make valuable STEM enrichment opportunities available to teachers and students who'd normally not have the same access to technology or equipment that students in more affluent schools do.
Our efforts help give all of these teachers, principals, and even the district superintendent the opportunities to see what Wonder Workshop has to offer in terms of enhancing STEM education and boosting real-world readiness. Area educators will have the chance to see the Dash and Dot Robots in action all thanks to this giveaway. We'll set up our webcam and use the student codes to run the Dash through an obstacle course and the student who makes the most successful run will win $100!
My heartfelt gratitude goes out to the Eduporium and Wonder Workshop teams for this generosity. Many of these students would otherwise probably not have this valuable educational enrichment.
We'd like to thank Imani for writing this post and extend our congratulations on being selected as the raffle recipient! We love that somebody with such a commitment to STEM education received this prize. To learn more about the KC Creators Club and their work in STEM education, be sure to visit their website! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram and, to find all the latest Wonder Workshop kits on our store, click below.