The Blog
Take your students on an unforgettable journey to the stratosphere! What can be more exciting than launching a balloon to the edge of space and seeing footage of the Earth from above? A weather balloon project (also known as High Altitude Balloon or HAB) involves designing a payload and using a helium balloon to send an experiment up to 100,000 feet into the stratosphere!
Based on three years of successful weather balloon experience with over 300 middle school students, we created a full guide that helps students design a payload, select an experiment, launch, and recover the balloon from a 100,000-foot journey to the edge of space!
Ready to launch your students into some space STEM activities? Read on to explore our top space-themed STEM activities. These activities are categorized into our 3 stages of STEM to fit different learning levels.
Join us as we give you all the details about our popular Space Lander STEM Challenge and link up with some other great STEM educators sharing the BEST STEM CHALLENGE EVER!
Teachers love the Space Lander STEM challenge because the students are completely engaged. Students not only learn, but deeply understand the engineering design process, key science concept, and math standards all while improving their soft skills involved in teamwork.
Earth Day (April 22nd) is a great opportunity to combine STEM with environmental awareness! Today’s students will be entrusted with preserving our planet for future generations. Industrialization, population growth, oil spills and other dangers threaten the safety of our home. Learning the science of plant growth and other critical functions of life here on Earth provides the foundation for engineering and technology developments that may save our planet.
This Earth Day, we challenge you to join us in giving kids hands-on STEM challenges that allows them to plant, design, and rescue. Find a freebie at the end of this post for you and your kids to enjoy too!
STEM education is sweeping the nation. From robotics competitions to coding games, school districts are scrambling to provide STEM programs while teachers sift through thousands of Pinterest pins in search of quality activities. As a STEM Director, I am always looking for new curriculum ideas, but my biggest frustration is the wide-range of activities that are labeled "STEM." Building a tower from spaghetti and tape is categorized the same as programming a Lego Mindstorm to navigate a maze. One project takes 10 minutes while the other requires weeks of critical thinking and learning a programming language. We need further clarification to distinguish these levels in STEM education. To help guide educators and administrators in the implementation of curriculum and development of programs, we propose the following 3 stages of STEM Education.
It’s almost Valentine’s Day and my kids are already plotting how to deliver those special messages to the ones they love! As a STEM educator, a valentine delivery must be more than dropping heart shaped paper into handmade mailboxes. So, we made a Valentine’s Day candy delivery STEM challenge using frogs - origami frogs that is!
