Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve been brainstorming unique ways we can help teachers continue to deliver meaningful STEAM learning experiences for students no matter where they are learning from. From the development of our Hybrid & Remote offerings to explorations of virtual coding platforms, we have learned a lot about how to adapt STEAM learning for this new time. We now have another offering to share—a brand-new Learning Everywhere kit that we helped develop with the Aecern team! We’re very excited about this partnership and this kind of hands-on STEM solution!
This is the first prototype of our Learning Everywhere kit with other options potentially to follow. We worked with the Aecern team—creators of the Scoutlier platform—to create this initial option specifically for remote learning. It'll include a couple of our favorite hands-on STEM tools in the Makey Makey and Electro Dough kit from Tech Will Save Us—both of which are highly portable and interactive so students could use them in various settings. What’s really great is children could align their hands, heads, and hearts through MakerEd challenges that they’ll take pride in.
In this time, we know student social-emotional health could be suffering and have worked to provide new suggestions for improvement. One of our favorite ways of doing that is through hands-on maker education. This type of approach truly helps kids focus on projects and academic outcomes while also giving them all a chance to express themselves and take pride in creatively completing these challenges. This kit definitely embodies the benefits of the Maker Movement and, thanks to recent events, helps boost social-emotional health, too. Students could complete different STEAM activities, helping them enjoy design thinking and problem solving lessons with cross-disciplinary STEAM and SEL.
We also worked to make sure that a kit like this would help educators create various new opportunities for differentiation. Since the components provide flexibility in the classroom or home, it makes a great solution for independent and collaborative learning. As you can probably also tell, it includes items from a couple of different EdTech vendors, serving as another example of how we can create custom EdTech kits to serve the always evolving needs of teachers and students as traditional learning environments evolve.
Now, let’s talk about the virtual component. Scoutlier is an online platform that's accessible on the web or as a mobile app on iOS and Android devices. It helps support learning in their classroom or at home, so it complements the Learning Everywhere kit nicely. While the new normal continued to evolve, this Scoutlier platform helped alleviate some of the obvious challenges teachers and parents were facing with delivering STEM instruction remotely. With Scoutlier, educators of any subject can add structure to online education, document student progress, and assess performance from anywhere. It also takes just a few moments for educators to create a free account and then they’re good to go!
The way it works is teachers could either create activities within the Scoutlier platform or convert existing lesson plans for children to access within Scoutlier. It takes just minutes for teachers to convert an existing lesson into a Scoutlier activity thanks to built-in design templates. If you prefer, you can also borrow one of the many activities that teachers and curriculum partners have created. When activities are ready, teachers can assign them to individual children or an entire class by sharing an assignment code. Once kids receive the assignment, they can use the Electro Dough, Makey Makey, or whatever the assignment calls for.
Speaking of those tools, they’re two of the components in our Learning Everywhere kit for use with the Scoutlier platform. Along with those, it also includes your six-pack of conductive dough, extra batteries, conductive tape, and access to Scoutlier's platform. The simplicity of the Scoutlier system makes it very easy for teachers to create lessons for students to follow and flexible enough to allow for tweaks should they want or need to do so. The platform and the kit have even by tested by one of our longtime teacher partners with great success.
The Learning: Everywhere solution is a low-cost, portable kit with non-tech learning materials and proven robotics, CS, and STEM resources. Using interactive digital activities, students can also access impactful opportunities on any device through the award-winning Scoutlier remote learning platform. These activities take teachers and students from “unboxing” all the way to generating and sharing solutions for completing real-world challenges. By giving students the ability to demonstrate their learning through media formats of their choice (video, photo, voice, text, data, etc.), even children who were the most vulnerable as a result of remote learning can become engaged and empowered to excel.
This is a custom kit created through a joint effort by the Eduporium and Aecern teams. If you're interested in purchasing this kit, please visit the Learning Everywhere page on our store or contact us. We are also working on creating customizable STEAM kits for in-person, hybrid, and remote learning. And, for all the latest news from Eduporium, follow us on Twitter and Instagram or subscribe to our newsletter!