3 Free STEM Activities for Kids

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November 8 is National STEM/STEAM Day, a holiday to encourage and inspire kids of all ages to lose themselves in the worlds of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math with STEM activities for kids. Now is the perfect time to encourage a love of learning for STEM. Statistics show few American students pursue STEM fields, but the need for STEM-oriented job skills is skyrocketing. The computing industry’s rate of job creation is 3x(!) the national average in the U.S. Unfortunately, research shows not only will we not have enough people to fill these jobs, but that the biggest gap will be among women who are expected to hold only 20% of computing jobs by 2025. Today is a great day to encourage everyone, especially girls, to fall in love with STEM/STEAM.

 

Help celebrate National STEM Day today or any day. Get started with these free STEM activities for kids to enjoy at home or in the classroom:

1. Complete a Superhero STEM Challenge

Left Brain, Craft Brain offers many fun and easy activities that introduce kids to the scientific method through art and science projects. Using the Superhero STEAM Challenge Cards kids can grow kryptonite crystals or build an Arc Reactor. Download the condensed version for free and channel your inner superhero!

2. Make a Robotic Face

Curiosity Machine, a STEM program run by nonprofit Iridescent, offers a wide variety of challenges teaching kids and their families everything from how to make a robotic face to building a self-driving car game using common household items. For families or teachers interested in continuing STEM education, the AI Family Challenge is another free program they offer inviting children ages 8-15 and their families to learn about artificial intelligence through hands-on challenges and then identify and solve a problem in their community.

3. Build a Rocket

Buggy and Buddy offers projects that inspire creativity and self-confidence in kids while promoting learning and fun. In their free straw rocket activity, kids learn science as they design and then launch their own rockets using straws.

 

We hope these activities inspire you, and the kids in your life, to explore and learn about STEM on National STEM Day and beyond.

Persevering Through the Unknown: My Conversation on Emotion AI and Problem Solving with Emily Mower Provost

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Tara Chklovski: What inspires you? Emily Mower Provost: The idea that we can use technology to understand people. Technology gives us new ways to learn about how humans communicate. It allows us to tackle the unknown. Advances in technology allow us to focus on problems that were previously deemed too difficult to handle. For example, […]

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Visualizing learning assessment data in a physics game

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Understanding how to assess learning is a big topic in education today, and as games are coming to the forefront as a valuable education tool, people are starting to wonder what games might be able to say about assessment. Well, at Iridescent we’ve been wondering about that too. This past summer we offered an internship to Vishesh Kumar to visualize and understand what our Ethers games might be able to say about Iridescent’s assessment claims. Vishesh spent the summer visualizing the data in both of our Ethers games in a initial exploratory analysis. We’re excited to be able to share the results with you in this blog post!

You can read the report from this past summer here. Please feel free to leave us comments in this blog post, we want to hear your thoughts!