STEAM

While it may not be as bad as it was once thought to be, there will almost certainly be jobs lost to technology. While there will likely be jobs created in their place, however, there is no denying that technologies like artificial intelligence will have their place in our lives. They are already very much in it, in fact, with

With this charismatic robot and accompanying app, students can play games, chat, control, and program the Cue in Blockly or JavaScript. They can even pick one of four avatars to represent and track their progress: Charge, Zest, Smirk, and Pep! Each avatar is preprogrammed with unique personalities, expressions, and interactions.

This Fourth of July, we decided to experiment with Bare Conductive’s Touch Board to help spark an interest in circuitry among our readers. The Touch Board is a limitless interface at the heart of some of Bare Conductive’s most innovative STEAM tools. Using it, students can turn touch into sound with the help of conductive materials.

In June, we announced a new educational technology grant program that awards $500 of STEM tools to one recipient every month. Our selection committee met last week and awarded the first grant to Melinda Pastuszak, a teacher at Chamberlayne Elementary School in Henrico, Va. Mindy is in the process of planning the launch of a new STEAM program!

As we know, STEM has evolved to STEAM, adding art to the mix (as well as some other variations). Technology can be a great way for students to enhance their art classes using tools like conductive paint, virtual reality, or more. It can also be used in music classes, though, creating interactive, exciting, and real world experiences.

Inventing things is a great way for children to blossom into STEAM superstars. Never running out of things to invent is a whole different experience. The littleBits Pro Library is new and improved, providing creative students with enough parts to design intricate inventions or colossal creations.

In this week’s Eduporium Experiment, we are taking a deeper look at Stikbot and its potential to enrich hands-on education in the early grades. Besides being an entertaining, posable toy that allows kids to use stop motion animation anywhere, it’s also a great way for them to learn to work in small groups, problem solve, and more.

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!

Kids today don’t seem to have the same enthusiasm to build a pillow fort or make costumes out of cardboard. Instead, it is all too common to see them playing with a smart device, but, the line of inventive kits from MakeDo aim to spark creativity in kids by facilitating hands-on building and engaging them with something other than technology.

Essentially, the premise of Marbotic is providing preschool teachers with a technology tool that engages students, allows for physical interaction, introduces letters and numbers, and helps build their foundational tech skills. You can probably see why we’re such big fans of this system and how it allows for tactile learning at such a young age!