Hi Gabriela and Team, Great video! At the NY Hall of Science, we also do a lot of literacy-based engineering for early childhood. We find that popular storybooks such as the Pigeon and Pete the Cat series have endearing characters that children resonate with. When we pose a design challenge where these characters need some sort of "help", this narrative becomes a hook and children are highly motivated to problem solve. It is truly fascinating! We too are thinking about ways to measure impact. Currently, we've been doing informal observations during prototyping sessions with PreK classrooms as well as photo/video documentation. Looking forward to reading the suggestions/resources in this strand. Hope we can collaborate sometime! 

Hi Jasmine,

Thank you for connecting. You are so right. It is very neat to see the children get so engaged when they want to help a character in the story.

I like the idea of photo/video documentation with an evaluation focus, That also opens the possibility of asking the children a question and then capturing their answer and video.

We would love to chat more and are always open to collaboration.

Thank you for your feedback and suggestions. We see the children really get into those stories where they act out part of the story on the mat, as you see when they play hide and seek with Dragon and Girl. They also are very engaged in any of the engineering design tasks, such as helping Otter by creating and testing a parachute for a soft landing in the Storytime STEM-pack Otter in Space.

Using a pre-and post-interview with the children is a great idea. We could ask the teachers to do a short interview at the beginning and end of the year with our next grant cycle. Does anybody have any interview questions that they successfully used with young children?

Thank you for the picture book suggestions!

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback to us. We agree, literature, STEM and young children is a perfect combination!

You also suggest the pre-post survey/interview. That is a great idea. Since the children are so young, we would probably have to find a way for the survey/interview answers to be asked and recorded  by an adult. Is anyone aware of an existing instrument that has age-appropriate content questions for STEM+C?

Our project originated through collaboration with public libraries that were looking for STEM professional development to integrate science into their summer reading club. The children’s librarians told us that they needed materials that were fun and engaging for kids, easy to use with minimal preparation time, and aligned to standards. We then found that other groups of educators had the exact same needs and loved our STEM-packs. We work with public libraries, Head Start classrooms and preschools.  On the elementary school side, Storytime STEM-packs are being implemented in STEAM programs, by classroom teachers K-2, the school library, and after-school and summer programs. 

Thank you so much for sharing the padlet!

Thanks for your prompt and comprehensive response!  I LOVE that your project was initiated through collaboration with public libraries.  I wish more people would take advantage of the many resources available through collaboration with local libraries.  One summer a colleague and I traveled to libraries in our state to provide hands-on math activities to young children based on the PBS Cyberchase program and we had a ball!

Thank you! We love our work!

We are so glad you mention the collaboration and talking through ideas. We feel that this is foundational to not only learn STEM and computer science, but also to become a happy, successful, and empathetic person and member of the community.

Yes, the storyboard gives the students the opportunity to extend the story and become an actor in the story.

This is an intriguing idea to try to follow some of the students track their interest in CS beyond the project. We need to think about how we might be able to make that happen without a long-term grant.

And, yes, we are looking to scale up, with and without grant funding. We are privileged to have been selected by the Iowa Governor’s STEM Advisor Council as one of the providers in the STEM Scale-up program for a second year. Working with the Iowa educators has been great, and we are looking to find other states that might have similar programs for their educators.

I am really happy to hear you have some scale-up support within your state. Do you have capacity to expand beyond Iowa? If so, do you have an idea of a classroom cost if other states or even individual schools were interested in joining?

We are very grateful to the folks at Iowa Governor’s STEM Advisor Council for their partnership, and yes we are looking for other states and organizations to partner with us to further scale up. In 2019/20 we were funded by the PA Department of Education in our home state of Pennsylvania via a PAmart grant. We also co-designed Storytime STEM-packs focused on Energy education for PreK-2 learners with our friends at Clean Energy Bright Futures, Bonneville Environmental Foundation (CE), based in Oregon. Through that partnership, several organizations in different states have received Storytime STEM-packs, including Oregon, California, and Arkansas. In addition, we’ve worked with the wonderful people at the West Sound STEM network to bring Storytime STEM-packs to teachers in Washington state. We customize the classroom packet for each of our partners. For the PAsmart grant, we focused on computer science and STEM, for CE on energy education, and for the West Sound STEM network, on mathematics, science, and engineering design. Accordingly, the cost for a classroom varies, depending on how many Storytime STEM Adventures and/or Storytime STEM-packs they wish to implement. Many individual schools and organizations have implemented Storytime STEM-packs by ordering directly from our website. We are excited for every opportunity to bring more STEM-packs to more kids. You can also look at our website and see all Storytime STEM+C Adventures and Storytime STEM-packs we currently offer.  Please contact us directly if you are interested in partnering

Our biggest and on-going challenge has been to find just the right storybook that provides an authentic context children for a phenomenon or problem-based activity for the children. At the same time, we also need to align the activity to an important STEM+C concept and find materials that are age-appropriate and cost-effective. It sounds easier than it is, and we spend a lot of time prototyping and discussing as we develop new Storytime STEM-packs.

We are constantly surprised by how receptive and creative the PreK-2 educators are. They embrace implementing the Storytime STEM-packs and they have so many ideas on how to connect them to what they are already doing with their kids. If we would hit the restart button, we would have started to integrate computer science earlier. We value our partners at Terrapin. Bee-Bots robots are a wonderful tool to support young children’s development of computational thinking. They are also very versatile in terms of integrating them into stories. The combination of Bee-Bot and the story-themed vinyl mats let us create a world for the children in which they can become actors.