When it comes to STEM in 21st century teaching and learning, there are few limits to what students can accomplish. Besides helping boost their overall engagement and enjoyment levels in the here and now, access to STEM learning and opportunities to build real-world skills often significantly improve how students prepare for the future. Whether it's with introducing them to coding in the early grades, engineering in their middle years, or the benefits of more complex technologies, like virtual reality or artificial intelligence, in high school, STEM education is a crucial piece of student development. With such huge potential and importance, however, this instruction requires planning, guidance, and equipment. And, as the economy keeps trending toward STEM-dominated professions and opportunities, exposure to these areas is vital. Thankfully, there are few restrictions to leading effective STEM lessons.
Our mission is helping educators develop students who are truly Future Ready and helping them facilitate relevant learning is how. To that end, we offer a robust online store filled with the latest STEM solutions. But, beyond that, we love creating and sharing impactful content to help enhance how educators use these tools in instruction. In this section of our blog, you'll find countless posts on trending STEM topics, how-to articles, many recommendations for classroom solutions and projects, industry updates, connections between STEAM tools and the future, and a lot more. We are also extremely committed to closing certain gaps and increasing equity in STEM education. As such, a lot of this content contains context for advancing inclusive opportunities for all kids. We encourage you to search through the posts to find something relevant for you. And, if there's any topics we've missed, let us know.
The current state of education is, of course, crucial to the future success of today’s students. They need innovative learning opportunities and creative challenges that will help them succeed down the road. What’s equally important in education is what’s on tap next. As a whole, education needs to be continuously evolving to best prepare students.
Congratulations to Amanda Callahan-Mims from Spring Hill Elementary School in Knoxville, TN! Amanda and her students are in the process of transforming their school’s Technology Lab into a fully integrated STEM Lab and she’s using her background as an archaeologist to inspire her students to use technology in new ways!
This week in the Eduporium Experiment, we’re delving into the popular engineering packs from PCS Edventures known as BrickLAB. Upon first glance, the components closely resemble LEGO bricks, but after doing some research and exploring, I found out that, while they may look like LEGOs, there is much more academic potential for BrickLAB.
When you think about it, the activities students can take part in using LEGOs are very much in line with current educational standards—especially those that deal with STEM. Now, there’s a new option for teaching engineering in early education. The kits from BrickLAB are packed with legitimate opportunities and now available on our store!
Every year, online analytics company, Onalytica, releases many different reports detailing who the top social media influencers are in certain areas. They recently released their report on STEM for July 2017-July 2018 and we’re excited to be a part of the Top 100 Brands in STEM! Not only did we crack the top 100, we’re No. 4!
We’re introducing another new blog series for educators! Each week, we will take a look at an online STEM resource teachers can use to better their instruction with hands-on opportunities. In the first edition of Rising Resources, we’re exploring Robot App Store, a resource designed to help teachers learn more about robotics in a number of ways!
This organization was derived from one of the oldest and most prominent organizations for children in the country. We first partnered with them two years ago and, after working together for one year, were asked to return for a second year and provide twice as much content and STEM kits for the students involved around the country.
It can be hard to convince teachers (let alone students) to use some of their summer vacation to improve their academic skills. This is, of course, understandable since they spend the rest of the year doing just that. Making summer learning fun, however, is a fairly reasonable compromise so that both educators and their students aren’t wasting time.
Sphero is already incredibly easy to integrate in the classroom and super simple for kids to learn coding. We don’t want the simplicity to stop with students, though, so we added Sphero’s Cheaper By the Dozen and Half Dozen kits on our store for teachers. Now, you can get more organized thanks to the included box (12-pack), charging hubs, covers,
It pays to have a friend with a makerspace and, using this connection, we put on a day of PD for 30 teachers at Pinky Inc. in Marlborough, MA. At the day-long workshop, the teachers worked together and designed some creative classroom activities centered on STEM tools, like Sphero, E-Blox, Cubetto, and more!
