We are so excited to bring the world of STEM to you! Let us start with the motivations for this blog. But first, brief introductions!
Who we are: We are Engineers and parents of young kids. We are based out of a suburb in North America.
Motivations: We were challenged with running a volunteer after-school STEM program at a school, which comprised of kids from all grades of elementary school! After a lot of research over a summer, we decided to make this a play based program. Age appropriate, safe STEM toys were identified. We were able to get enough volunteers to split the kids into two groups of younger and older kids. This allowed us to use age appropriate STEM toys per individual room. Having run the program for a year, here are some learnings that we can share with you:
- When you have a broad age group of students, theoretical concepts cannot be taught. In addition, most kids did not want to learn new concepts by pure whiteboard explanations. They wanted to get straight into play.
- Safety is number one priority, especially when instructor to student ratio is high. For that reason, we bought age appropriate, well reviewed STEM toys.
This brings us to our motivations for creation of this blog:
- We wanted to allow parents/guardians to learn more about the products we bought for our students in the program.
- We wanted to increase the value of our in-class interactions by capturing them here in our blog. Specifically, we want to address some common questions asked by students about the products we used, as well as additional ideas we had.
We hope you enjoy reading this blog and especially the tried and tested STEM products we discuss! Subscribe
