Immersing children in STEM education can inspire a lifetime of passion and fulfillment. National STEM/STEAM Day offers the perfect opportunity to start that journey. Here you can find inspiration for activities that will spark joy, curiosity, and creativity in kids of all ages and help them learn to think critically and solve problems.
On November 8, millions of schoolchildren across the United States will celebrate National STEM/STEAM Day, placing fun and innovative ways to learn science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics squarely in the center of attention.
National STEM/STEAM Day was created in 2015 to help address the growing achievement gap between the U.S. and other countries in these crucial disciplines. Studies from the early 2000s illustrated how the U.S. was falling behind and raised alarms about the dire economic consequences of a workforce that was ill-prepared to drive innovation.
The Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to ensuring successful learning throughout the education journey, conducted research that revealed that U.S. educators lacked knowledge about the implications of STEM and how important it was for students to gain scientific and technological literacy. It also found that educators lacked in-depth knowledge of STEM-related careers, making it even more difficult for them to successfully guide students to those fields.
In response, U.S. toy manufacturer MGA Entertainment created National STEM/STEAM Day to help train and inspire educators to develop curricula that highlights these impactful fields and engages and inspires students. The date was intentionally chosen because “Nov. 8” is a numeronym, pronounced “innovate.”
According to a study by the American Society for Engineering Education, effective STEM programs should include some or all of these elements:
- Students solving real-world problems
- The integration of multiple elements of the STEM fields
- Student-centered teaching that encourages lots of questions
- Collaboration and communication between students
- Activities that inspire creative, critical, and innovative thinking
In addition, according to Defined Learning, education experts believe arts can help open STEM doors to underrepresented students and spark imaginative ways to tackle STEM challenges. After all, scientists and mathematicians have been incorporating visual tools to explain their ideas for centuries. But these educators also warn that art needs to be fully integrated with the other elements of STEM, not merely be treated as an introductory or supplementary tool.
Although the importance of STEM has gained mainstream acceptance, there’s been more confusion — and even some pushback — to the inclusion of the “A” to the acronym. Arts advocates pushed for its inclusion because artistic expression can often serve as the entry point for more creative and expressive approaches to the STEM fields that can help drive innovation. This creativity can help solve and even anticipate challenges before they become insurmountable. A STEAM approach to education can also help make students more creative and empathetic, which rounds out the economic benefits of molding students better educated in science and math.
The goal, of course, of providing this type of education is to eventually build a workforce steeped in STEAM knowledge and practices. Job data from the 2022 Census shows that there’s still significant work to do, especially with the youngest generation now just joining the workforce, and is precisely why events like National STEM/STEAM Day are so important.
According to Census data, in 2021, workers aged 16 and 24 made up 12.7% of total employment nationwide but only accounted for 6.8% of all STEM workers. One challenge confronting this generation is that STEM jobs often require a bachelor’s degree at minimum. So, younger people looking for a job without a college degree have limited options. This is occurring against the backdrop of Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that employment in STEM occupations (10.8%) is predicted to grow at double the rate of overall employment (5.3%) over the next seven years.
The challenge becomes how to train students with a STEM/STEAM mentality and eventually inspire enough of them to pursue careers in these various fields.
Celebrating National STEM/STEAM Day
There are a number of fun and interactive activities you can do to celebrate National STEM/STEAM Day with the children in your life. The following examples will help you show kids how these fields affect our world, inspire curiosity and enthusiasm, and maybe even pique their interest in pursuing a career in a related field.Take a field trip. This could mean piling onto the school bus or hopping in the car to immerse children in the world of STEM. Your destination could be the local library, a nearby botanical garden or conservatory, or a science museum. And if the logistics of an actual trip are too difficult, many museums offer virtual tours so children can get that STEM spark from their own device. These types of activities can help children see how new inventions came about and spark their own creativity in problem solving.
Some ideas for virtual field trips include:
- Visit the Science at Home section of Discovery Education and 3M’s Young Scientist Lab to watch 3M scientists, other children, and even a former Miss America perform experiments you can follow along with at home using everyday materials.
- Tour a recycling center and landfill to learn about the scientific mechanisms behind how they operate and the environmental science behind these facilities.
- Zoom off to space with the help of NASA to explore the surface of Mars or the Moon.
- You don’t have to live in Boston to check out the city’s exceptional Museum of Science. Their website offers a virtual tour in addition to an abundance of resources and ideas. And within minutes, you can hop down the east coast for an exceptional virtual experience at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
- If animals are more your thing, you can tap into live cams for the Atlanta Zoo, San Diego Zoo, and National Aquarium.
Highlight the world around them. You can also encourage innovative thinking by focusing kids’ attention on the many STEM-centric items that improve their day-to-day lives as well as the natural world around them. By sparking a conversation about the discoveries and inventions all around us — including those that are so ubiquitous that we likely take them for granted — you can help them understand how this type of thinking solves real-life problems and encourage some unconventional thinking about other ways they can help the world around them.
For example, you can:
- Discover an American treasure — our national parks system — with activities that incorporate art while allowing students to explore the parks’ natural beauty and stretch their creative muscles.
Leverage the National Environmental Education Foundation’s wealth of resources to help children develop a love for nature by growing a garden and learning to compost, both of which can help spark creativity and promote learning while also giving children something beautiful they can enjoy long after National STEM/STEAM Day is over.
- Teach kids an invaluable skill that will also help them learn how their favorite websites and smartphone apps actually work with fun coding activities. Whether you’re working with advanced students or with children just beginning their journey of discovery, there’s no shortage of resources that are fun and educational. To get started, check out:
- MIT’s Scratch, the world’s largest free coding community for kids
- Lightbot, an iPhone and Android game that tacitly teaches children of all ages programming logic while they play
- Microsoft MakeCode, a free online learn-to-code platform that allows anyone to build games, code devices, and mod Minecraft
- Hour of Code tutorials and activities designed to introduce kids to computer science
- Tynker, a subscription service that makes learning programming and developing problem-solving and critical thinking skills fun
- Code Combat, which helps older and more advanced students learn to code
- Encourage critical thinking by encouraging children to use building blocks or solve puzzles. Indulge their artistic side or challenge them to solve real-world problems through pretend play.
Discuss STEAM careers. Invite children to discuss their interests to help identify activities likely to keep their attention and, for older kids, discover relevant STEM- and STEAM-related fields, as the many ways they can likely combine their hobbies or passions with a STEM career are unlikely to occur to them without outside influence. For example, if they love animals, you can discuss biology, or if they love sports, you can highlight how engineers design equipment or how teams are increasingly enlisting experts in any number of scientific fields to try to gain competitive advantages. You can also bring in parents or members of the community to talk about their STEM and STEAM jobs to engage their curiosity and help them see that this line of work is attainable. Careers in STEM not only pay about $14,000 more than non-STEM jobs at just about every education level, they can also help close racial and ethnic wage gaps and connect rural workers to more opportunities. And there’s projected to be millions more STEM jobs created in the coming years.
Have fun with technology. There’s a wide range of STEM toys, as well as books and kits, that you can deploy to make learning interactive and fun. Letting children play with robots and other coding devices — can spark joy and creativity and teach problem-solving skills. For example:
- There’s a good chance that some, if not all, of the children in your life love Minecraft. Tap into that passion with game-based learning.
- You can also help children make their own mini robots or propeller-powered cars.
Have some budget-conscious fun. Technology and interactive activities don’t need to be expensive. You can devise fun, creative, and engaging activities your children can do entirely with materials you can find at the local dollar store. Whether you want to learn about motion or dinosaurs, there’s something for every curious learner of any age. You can also host a paper airplane competition, participate in free activities sure to inspire some specific ideas from the categories above, or relax with a bowl of popcorn during a STEM-inspired movie night designed to inspire your young learners.
Learn About STEM pioneers, especially from underrepresented communities. One of the most important missions of National STEM/STEAM Day is inspiring children from underrepresented demographics to one day pursue a career in these fields. For example, women currently comprise about half of the national workforce but hold less than a quarter of all STEM jobs, and Black people make up 11% of the workforce but just 9% of STEM workers. It can be extremely effective to teach students about role models in the STEM world who look like them and belong to their community. The resources linked here can help and, to bring it all together, you can build a periodic table of scientists and inventors to highlight the diversity of inspiring people you learned about together.
The Power in Nov8
National STEM/STEAM Day can be the spark that ignites a passion for these fields in the young people in your life, and the long-term benefits of creating that spark can be profound. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, STEM jobs are typically higher paying than jobs in non-STEM professions and also more stable. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how fragile the labor market can be, and the unemployment in STEM fields stayed consistently lower than non-STEM during the pandemic.
Beyond that, STEM jobs typically possess the characteristics that majorities of people find fulfilling, as many people say it’s important for them to be involved in positive social change and make the world a better place. Many STEM jobs empower people to realize these goals, whether it’s developing new technologies that make peoples’ lives easier or solving significant problems, like addressing the climate crisis, curing diseases, or replenishing food sources.
So November 8 is the perfect time to engage in fun and educational projects you can often execute with household items and introduce the kids in your life to exciting technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, likely to inspire creativity and critical thinking and sure to be a steadily increasing part of their day-to-day lives. Although, every day is a great day to capitalize on children’s curiosity and inspire a lifetime of exploration.
