Engaging Students Stuck at Home

SHARING IDEAS ON HOW TO ENGAGE YOUR STUDENTS IN STEM ACTIVITIES WHILE YOU’RE STUCK AT HOME.

In this unprecedented time, parents and teachers alike are looking for meaningful ways to engage students in learning from home. There are hundreds of resources online that generate math problems or read stories aloud, and hundreds of more ideas online for how families can take everyday moments and turn them into a learning experience. 

BUILDING CHALLENGES

Building challenges are a great way to engage your students in fun, hands-on learning. These STEM challenges are easy to make up yourself – or there are millions of ideas online too. They’re also great because, for the most part, you can use materials you have just sitting around your house.

For example, you can use toothpicks and marshmallows one day and ask your children to build the tallest tower they can. The next day you can repeat the exact same challenge but with Legos, or paper and tape, or playdoh and popsicle sticks. 

The following week it could be building a bridge between your couch and coffee table. The possibilities are truly limitless. 

Bonus parent points if you can find a project that you truly need to be completed around your house that your children can help design and build. Perhaps a raised flower bed, or a new coffee table. You could add in math by making them take into account the cost of the materials as well! 

CHEMISTRY CONCOCTIONS

There are so many chemistry projects that are easy to do from home, even with supplies you already have around. You can build a volcano, make your own playdough or slime, or test out some chemical reactions (like putting Mentos in Diet Coke!). There’s also a lot of cooking projects that might be fun – and yummy! – to do. For example, you can make your own ice cream in a Ziplock bag!

GARDENING

Now is the perfect time to teach your child about the water cycle and plant life! Work together to plan, plant, and care for a garden. You can even choose something they love to cook to be the focus. For example, if your kids love pasta, you could make a garden full of great ingredients for pasta sauce (tomato, pepper, onion, oregano, basil, parsley). Or maybe your kids love fruit and would love tending strawberries all season long. Whatever it is, get their buy-in so they can help with the watering, weeding, and harvesting when the time comes! 

DESCARTES AND EDISON

Finally, DESCARTES and EDISON are our own engineering-focused STEM tools for teaching mathematics and science concepts through hands on experiments, gaming challenges, and engineering projects. Students can virtually design any number of structures and vehicles and apply grade-appropriate math and science concepts. DESCARTES and EDISON use powerful engineering tools behind the scenes but have an easy to use interface perfect for elementary and middle students.

DESCARTES is formulated for elementary users in Grades 3-6 and EDISON for Grades 6-9 and both are delivered through the browser on laptops and tablets. These tool include many different STEM standards aligned design modules for projects involving: Boats, Submersibles, Airships, Gliders, Bridges, RC Cars, and Rockets. DESCARTES and EDISON engineering design project lessons that align with different classroom standards at each grade level.

With DESCARTES and EDISON students can create complicated designs; analyze these designs with math, science, data, and plots; simulate these designs; 3D print or hand fabricate a prototype, and collect test data in the real world. Best of all its design even works well at home, with common materials, in table-top design projects.

Click here to learn more about the extended free DESCARTES and EDISON trials today:
https://www.parametricstudioinc.com/free-trial