About STEMspire
Problem Statement
Uninterest in STEM among low-income middle school students puts low-income students at a disadvantage and decreases diversity within STEM fields. “Nationally, three in five children in families with higher incomes (62%) participate in a STEM activity in their afterschool program twice per week or more, but just 56% of children in families with low incomes do.”(blackengineer.com.) Low-income middle students feel unmotivated to learn about STEM because their school doesn't have the resources to make their curriculum more hands-on, engaging, and inspiring. Since a large majority of minority students attend low-income middle schools, leading to the lack of minorities in the STEM field.
Solution Statement
To address the lack of STEM materials in CMS middle schools, we propose creating customized STEM kits tailored to enhance hands-on learning. These kits will include essential materials and tools for interactive experiments that align with the middle school curriculum, making STEM education more engaging, accessible, and effective. Here’s how the solution will work:
We design a wide range of STEM kits covering subjects like chemistry, biology, and engineering, ensuring each kit contains materials for hands-on experiments. The kits will be adaptable to various STEM fields and can be customized based on teachers’ needs and lesson plans. We will collaborate closely with middle school teachers to understand their current lesson plans and curriculum requirements. Based on this, we’ll propose a variety of kits designed to support specific lessons, allowing teachers to select the kits that best fit their students’ needs and learning objectives. After teachers have used the STEM kits in their classrooms, we will gather their feedback on the effectiveness and ease of use. This feedback will guide improvements to the kits, ensuring they continue to meet educational goals and become even more aligned with the curriculum.
We are STEMspire and our goal is to inspire the low-income diverse youth to consider a future career in STEM.
We propose creating customized STEM kits tailored to enhance hands-on STEM learning for low income middle school students. Our STEM kits are not just any STEM kits but they reinvent the way students learn STEM by altering the way schools teach their students.
We’re creating an exciting series of STEM kits that bring a wide range of concepts to life—from aerospace engineering to marine biology—capturing the curiosity of students across all different STEM interests. Designed to engage both students and educators, each kit offers hands-on experiments that are based on the teachers curriculum with feedback from students and teachers helping us refine and enhance each experience for maximum impact and learning in future kits.
Diversity in stem is such a large problem and starting to inspire kids from a young age is a crucial way to really start to help out early. Focusing our efforts
on lower-income students will give them opportunities to match their high-income peers when it comes to STEM classrooms. We hope that our kits will engage students, and spark their interest so that they are “STEMspired” to pursue a future career in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math.
Our Solution
STEM Kits To Engage Middle School Students At An Early Age!
