For much of the past year, we have been working very closely with a major afterschool organization to create content, kits, and STEM experiences for students. 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 solutions.
Beginning last summer, our team started drafting content for these children. The premise is that the camp-like atmosphere they’re working in as part of this afterschool STEM program should have a greater STEM focus since that is so relevant to their futures. So, about a year ago, we pitched ideas for four areas of content—all for different grade levels and all evolving around one central technology, including the Edison Robot, mBot-S, littleBits Rule Your Room Kit, and a NooElec Software Defined Radio (SDR).
After working with this organization last summer, the plans were finalized to develop six 1-hour lessons using each of these four tech tools. From there, we started developing the content, which includes a bunch of sections and a great amount of educational material for the kids to learn. Included in each packet is an overview of the 6-week program, summaries for every meeting, helpful information for instructors, background information for the kids, lists of materials they would need for each project, activity overviews, engaging questions, safety recommendations, and step-by-step instructions for carrying out some truly innovative STEM experiments.
Sound like a lot? It’s pretty fair to say that. In fact, the four final versions for each STEM tool wound up being about 50 pages each!
It took a while for our team to draft, revise, and finalize all of the activities for the program. After getting started on this year’s content around Labor Day 2017, we completed the final versions in April 2018. It was a lot of hard work, based around weekly phone calls with the program’s leader, but well worth the effort to help make a difference in the lives and futures of these students.
The ultimate goal of the program and our involvement in it is to create learning experiences that allow students to practice real-world STEM skills, like coding, collaboration, engineering, and problem solving. That’s why we chose to use the Edison, mBot, Rule Your Room Kit, and NooElec SDR receiver. Each of these technologies provide multiple entry points for STEM and allow students to fine tune a number of different 21st century skills.
The program is broken up into three age groups: Elementary school, middle school, and high school. For this year’s content, we provided two sets of six weeks’ worth of curricula on the littleBits Rule Your Room Kit and Edison Robot for elementary aged students. The middle school students are going to be exploring six weeks of content around the mBot and high school students will be working with the NooElec Software Defined Radio for six weeks. Last year, we created content around the Ozobot Evo for elementary students, a drone for middle school students, and the Internet of Things (IoT), leveraging the Raspberry Pi for high school students.
It’s not just the EdTech product in the kits, though. For example, The Intro to Electronics kits, which are based around the Rule Your Room Kit, each contained two littleBits Rule Your Room kits, two pieces of string, two pairs of scissors, multiple printouts, markers, and tape. It wasn’t easy getting all the boxes packed (there were 600 Rule Your Room boxes total!), especially when we ran into a bit of a problem when we cut the pieces of string into half the size they were supposed to be. Like true problem solvers, however, we persevered and spent the week of Fourth of July packing boxes and preparing them for shipment.
Luckily, we did not have to ship the content we created because we are able to send that electronically. At around 50 pages per product with four products and around 900 kits in total, that would have been a lot of paper! On second thought, double that because we created two versions of each set of activities—one for the students to read along with while they’re doing the projects and one for their leaders to have to direct them (yes, it has tons of hints so the leader is well ahead of the kids!).
So, despite a couple of minor hiccups, we recently got all of the technology kits shipped out and our office is starting to return to its normal look. We shipped the kits to a central location, where officials from the organization will then be shipping them on to programs all over the country!
We continue to be incredibly excited to have this opportunity and cannot wait to see how students like using this new technology to invent, explore, and innovate. As our work on this year’s program wraps up, however, we are already looking ahead to next year and developing some brand-new content for children while working with this outstanding organization.
If you are part of an afterschool or in-school program and looking for some new ways to use STEM solutions with students, we’d love to hear from you! We can provide the EdTech products (our store has over 900), content for the projects, or any advice you might need to assure a successful program.
Please send us an email, give us a call at 1 (877) 252-0001, or visit our website, our social media channels for more information!