“STEM Day 2024”
By Scott Hamilton
National STEM Day is celebrated on November 8 each year to encourage children to explore careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math (STEM). You may have noticed that Art does not have a letter in the STEM acronym; that is because in the first years of the program, Art was not considered a necessary career for national improvement. It was discovered a couple of years into the STEM program that art is an essential element to sciences. There have been recent efforts to change the acronym to STEAM, including the important element of the arts, but it has failed to go mainstream.
I don’t know if the local schools are doing anything special for STEM Day this year, but I would highly recommend as parents that you take some initiative to do something as a family. I think a lot of us lose sight of the importance of these career development opportunities, especially in younger children. The Department of Defense has an excellent resource for materials to help celebrate STEM Day at https://dodstem.us/stem-day and I highly recommend checking it out. In the next few paragraphs I am going to give you a few ideas on how to celebrate the day and learn something about each particular area of STEM.
A great way to get you and your child involved in science is to do some quick and easy science experiments at home. Most of them you can do with things you already have around the house. One of my favorites is to create a baking soda and vinegar volcano. For this particular experiment I like to pour a pile of flour on the table and form it into a mountain with a crater in the top, then fill the crater with baking soda. If you have red and yellow food coloring, mix it with some vinegar and then slowly pour the mixture in the crater. I won’t give away the results in case you have never done this before. It’s a great idea to ask the kids what they think will happen.
As far as involving them in technology, this one happens to be my favorite. You will need to find some broken device; if you are really brave and careful you can use a working one. It is great to let kids watch as you take apart some (even simple) electronic device. I recommend a cheap solar calculator from Dollar Tree if you don’t have anything else. Once the device is taken apart, see if you can identify different parts of the device and what they do. Here you will need to utilize Google and do some searching for parts; most electronics parts have a part number stamped on them, and the ones that don’t have color-coded bands to identify them. Don’t worry if you can’t figure anything out; the goal is to pique curiosity.
For engineering I like to recommend trying to build something mechanical. A couple of great examples are bridges between two tables or a tower that reaches the ceiling. For this project, you can utilize anything you have around the house. My family has done it with Lincoln Logs, LEGOs, popsicle sticks, straws, tape, folded paper, cardboard, and sticks out of the back yard. The idea here is to get creative and make some kind of mechanical device. Another great one is to do an egg drop challenge. In the egg drop, the goal is to make a container which will prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from a certain height.
When it comes to the art aspect, if you did the engineering task you already covered some aspects of art, but now you should consider doing an art project of some sort. This can be simply coloring or drawing a picture. I like to take the kids outside with a sketch pad and ask them to do their best by drawing a tree in the yard, a picture of the house, or the view from the backyard. You can make it more challenging by making it a contest and limiting supplies. My kids like to pick three random colored sharpies and try to make the best monster, tree animal, etc. If you have the options of musical instruments, music fits into the arts category as well. You can also write or tell a story for art; just find something fun that gets the creative juices flowing.
The final category is math and it can be difficult to make math fun. On this one it really depends on the age of your children and your skill levels in math. I like to use graphing for this one and create things like a mystery graph picture. There are several free examples online, or you can make up your own. You start with a piece of graph paper (these are usually around 20×40) and draw a picture on it, using the grid lines as a guide and keeping all the lines straight between two grid points. You then just write down in a tracing order the points on the graph, and give the kids a piece of graph paper and this list of points. See if they can make the picture.
I hope you enjoy some of these activities with your kids sometime this week. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@**********rd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
