Boredom
is major challenge to STEM education. Not many people have a natural love for mathematics and or a God given inclination to understand science. My son was able to sort his numbers 1-9 backwards and forwards by 8 months. I am a mathematician and recognized understood the significance of this – numbers are an ordered set and having the ability sort them forwards and backwards presented a high-level mastery of concept. I have been able to nurture my sons love for numbers. Most children don’t receive this, and especially children who come for socially economically disadvantaged situations.
If you can’t reach a child, you can’t teach a child. Unfortunately, not every child is exposed to the right STEM experience that they can connect with. Once a child becomes bored with math and science their mind shuts down and starts to focus on other things that they can easily connect with. This leads to them not being able to develop questions about math and science. Urban socially disadvantaged children are at a major disadvantage because they don’t have nature around them.
Children growing up in environments where they can experience nature develop will be exposed to Earth Science. Thus, these children will have more opportunities to develop questions about science because they will literally see nature change in several ways in front of their eyes. Urban children who are in socially and economically disadvantaged situations lack these opportunities. Some children often start to ask questions of survival at far too young of an age, the wrong questions, questions that lead a child down the wrong path of life.
We design and implement STEM learning activities that engage children’s curiosity and sense of wonder. This leads to the desire to explore and understand through hands-on learning where students work with one another to share their ideas and questions.
With Driving to Success, we seek to unlock a child’s intrinsic desire to learn by enabling them to connect math and science to an everyday way, a car. Cars are something that lots of children fascinated with, furthermore children see cars moving around in both urban and rural environments. Driving to Success is a self-contained STEM module, which combines a wooden car kit, with a rigorous workbook that takes them through a series of experiments. The car kit comes with screws, paint, stickers, paint brush and small screwdriver. The workbook focuses on teaching algebra and other fundamental math concepts e.g. graphing through a plethora of experiments centered around racing the car.
We start with creativity. The first step after the optional review is for each student to design and construct their own car. By having the students design the car, we are allowing them to unlock their creative energies and take ownership of their education. It is their car; they make the decisions that will dictate success or failure. The combination or creativity and ownership unlocks the intrinsic motivation to achieve.
Intrinsic motivation is an inner drive that propels a person to pursue an activity, not for external rewards, but because the action itself is enjoyable. In other words, a person is motivated by the fun, challenge, or satisfaction involved with an activity, not for an outside outcome, pressure, or reward. Context provides questions, children will who don’t have the context of STEM presented in their everyday lives stand at a disadvantage. Driving to Success is designed to help the children think and reflect about what they are doing and thus connect math and science concepts to their everyday world.
A child’s brain is a sponge which soaks up all that it is exposed to. We expose them to math and science concepts at a young age. Our STEM Projects are designed to provide complexity, without difficulty thus enabling the students to see how math and science intertwined into their everyday lives. These easy to do hands on activities will enable them to make learning 3D. They will design, build, experiment, record, and calculate; thus, drawing their own conclusions and pugging the right questions into their brains. With the right questions driving or directing one’s life in a success direction is easy.
