Kids are born innovators. Any parent who’s caught their child building pyramids out of restaurant creamer cups knows this. KiwiCo helps them channel their creativity with monthly subscription boxes of STEAM-focused activities — with these hands-on kits, little makers might build an arcade claw, design their own pinball game, or create a paint pendulum. The company was founded by Sandra Oh Lin, a mother of three in California. We asked her how she parents.
Bill Nye, the '90s television icon, the teacher who helped kid-me understand topics like buoyancy and momentum, the man whose mission it is to help make science more accessible to the masses, is back. (Not that he ever left - he's always been really, really busy.) These days, Nye is teaming up with Nintendo to help promote the just-released Nintendo Labo and is getting ready for the premiere of the third season of his Netflix show, Bill Nye Saves the World.
At a time when science instruction time is quickly declining in elementary schools, I asked our favourite Science Guy what parents can do to get kids excited about the subject he loves most.
Educators and researchers agree early literacy experiences are important for children’s cognitive and language development. But what about STEM? Here are five things parents can do every day to help develop science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills from a young age.
A national searchable database of both locally available and online science, technology, engineering and mathematics activities is up and running. STARportal is the nation's first dedicated platform connecting students, parents and teachers with STEM events in their local community, as well as online activities.
In 2013, a meeting of academics specialising in teaching first year undergraduate mathematics (known as the FYiMaths network) identified that the broad removal of mathematics prerequisites for many undergraduate degrees had created the biggest challenge they faced in teaching.
This weekend, school students from around the country will be competing in the 2016 FIRST Robotics Asia Pacific final -- by besieging a castle with homemade semi–autonomous robots. It's being billed as self–driving cars meets Game of Thrones and is clearly the coolest thing to happen in science, technology, engineering or mathematics. Which is kind of the point.
Hopefully your kids are getting a great education in science, technology, engineering and maths at school, but chances are those classes aren't enough to instil a lifelong interest in these fields for most kids. As parents, however, there are a lot of easy ways we foster a greater love of learning and exploration in STEM subjects in our children.
There are tons of different ways to teach your kids basic maths concepts, but if you're looking for something a bit more fun, the folks over at Scholastic have a guide for using LEGO bricks to teach concepts like fractions, square numbers, and more.
In our vision for innovation we see changes that drive the kind of industry-academia based interaction Australia needs. Tax changes, a restructure of how universities are funded, broader training for post-graduate students to include industry engagement and changes to some anachronistic institutions such as CSIRO. But as a country, we're still not doing enough to push the cultural change necessary for a technically innovative society.
