The Value of These Individual STEM Kits
Education is in uncharted territory. Instructors, Administrators, Districts, Universities, After School Programs, At-Home Learning — we are all trying to answer the same questions. What is education going to look like? How can we provide our students with quality education, regardless of the interruptions? Are we developing temporary solutions, or, as plans change week-by-week, are we etching a new educational norm into stone? And the worst part about these questions is we don’t know the answers. Simply put, we can’t know, and for a lot of parents and educators, that’s a startling notion. In a world we’re so used to controlling, our options are fuzzy with new opportunities to be discovered.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. Learning does not need to grind to a halt — this is a time to adapt.
As educators and lifelong learners, we are committed to making the necessary changes to ensure our students don’t fall behind. We adapt to the situation in front of us. We will right the ship, throw the map overboard and turn our floundering into an expedition. We will make the most of the opportunities in front of us. With safety as a top priority, one option is to focus on individual curriculum and materials kits for each student that are true, tried and tested. We, at PCS Edventures, have bundled Individual STEM Kits that help all educators make the most out of teaching no matter the learning environment.
What are these Individual STEM Kits?
Individual STEM Kits are quality curriculum and hands-on learning tools many educators worldwide have come to know and love from PCS Edventures, only they’ve been paired-down to address the needs of an individual or small group of students. They contain all the supplies needed and standard-aligned lessons as our 30+ student kits, but we’ve done all the work behind the scenes to prepare them for safe, individualized, distance learning.
Each kit is ready-to-go right out of the box. As soon as it arrives in a student’s hands, an Individual STEM Kit engages learners in relevant, self-paced STEM learning. With a myriad of ways these paired-down kits are being used, homeschooling, K-12 education and after-school/club educators love how quickly and seamlessly they adapt to our changing world.
Teachers are talking about how Individual STEM Kits keep students engaged and excited about learning.
Individual STEM Kit Pathways
The Individual STEM Kits fit any curriculum path and are malleable enough to adhere to any district plan. Let’s look at a few of the ways Individual STEM Kits keep learners engaged while at home, in small groups or full classroom settings.
Individualized At-Home Learning
Each kit is fully-reusable, contains no single-use consumables, is easily sanitizable, and holds enough materials and curriculum to engage 1-to-3 or 1-to-6 learners at a time.
For individual learners interacting with the lessons at home, a self-paced curriculum guides them through hands-on learning objectives, activities and challenges. With fun and engaging lessons like this, you’ll find it hard to pull kids away from their assignments.
Download free curriculum samples here.
Each kit is designed around relevant topics students are actively interested in, like video production, drones and zoology, and the accompanying curriculum is created by real teachers working inside today’s standards, alignments and 20th-century skills.
From one student to a small group, each Individual STEM Kit is prepared in our safe, CDC guideline adhering warehouse, ensuring everyone gets a chance to continue their education without risking their health. In addition, sanitizing the reusable materials is as easy as running a load of dishes, and every kit is scalable to fit the needs of the group.
Classroom Learning
For larger classroom settings, the Individual STEM Kits offer new ways for students to pursue self-guided learning. Rather than preparing the same unit for 30+ learners, imagine having a bank of individual learning kits primed for each student to follow wherever intrigue and investigation takes them. By creating a secure time and area for students to discover and investigate the subjects and projects they’re most interested in, you’re allowing them to actively participate in their own learning. According to modern research from Ohio State University, allowing students to investigate on their own, they’re more likely to seek out and discover everything available to them in order to avoid missing out on any one thing in particular.
“Exploration seems to be a major driving force during early childhood – even outweighing the importance of immediate rewards,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.
As they discover and lead their own learning, educators can structure the time by having students present on what they’ve done, showcase what they’ve created or lead a discussion on everything they’ve discovered. Inside of a structured environment, creating moments where students can drive their own education with self-directed learning increases ownership of learning, fosters metacognition, develops career skills and helps students develop an appreciation for learning.
As each kit is fully self-contained, there’s no need to source materials and curriculum, or to spend hours testing lesson plans. As with all PCS Edventures curriculum, the Individual STEM Kits are extensively tested and reviewed by leaders in the local teaching community. We’ve seen the results hands-on STEM enrichment can make. With over 30 years of experience developing and testing kits in classrooms and our own afterschool labs, we’ve perfected the science of keeping students excited about learning. They’re ready to be integrated into existing semester plans, and they’re in-depth and comprehensive enough to stand on their own from start to finish.
When you hand your students the wheel of the ship you give them an incredible STEM experience they will eagerly navigate.
On top of multiple individual kits, PCS Edventures has also created the Discover STEM LAB series, a curriculum collection housing units in Zoology, Digital Video Production, Programming, Math, Foundational Physics, Robotics, Engineering and Renewable Energy! Each Discover STEM LAB program includes four individual kits and custom storage units geared towards the 3-4 and 5-6 grade bands. The Discover STEM LAB kits are ready to engage up to 24 students with over 100+ hours of hands-on STEM learning!
The Dollars and Sense of Individual STEM Enrichment
Let’s review the longevity, reusability and safety of the Individual STEM Kits.
Each Individual STEM Kit:
- Comes with 12-23 hours of student-driven resources.
- This includes the built-in optional extensions,like the BrickLAB Zoology option to research any of the 3-8 million beetle species on the Earth.
- Is highly reusable.
- There are no consumables needed to complete a lesson. Every material, student curriculum page and instructions are completely ready to go and reuse time and time again, straight out of the box.
- Is easily sanitized.
- Sanitizing the hands-on materials and keeping students safe is a breeze.
Investment to Value:
Let’s say you purchase Discover Digits & Design, the flexible, manipulative-based mathematics kit, for $370.00. Now, let’s say students aren’t following the built-in optional extensions and are only interacting with the program for exactly 12, one-hour lessons. Each 1 hour, hands-on, math lesson costs as little as $30 for that one student if it were only used 1-time.
Now, let’s consider a student who works through all 12 hours of lessons, then returns the kit. The materials can be sanitized by the school and assigned to another student who will also benefit from the program. If only 2 students went through the program the cost per student drops to $15.
Most educators repeat the use of the program many times over. If you have a 30 student classroom, where each learner only interacts with the 12, one-hour lessons once, you end up spending less than a dollar per lesson over the course of a full classroom working through a set of cutting-edge curriculum.
By implementing one Discover Digits & Design kit at $370.00 in a 30 student classroom, you’re spending $12.33 for each student to have 12 hours of hands-on STEM interaction. Combine that with the optional extensions, existing curriculum and natural learner intrigue, and your cost per student drops into pennies on the hour.
Highly reusable and easily sanitized, the Individual STEM Kits can be implemented semester after semester in an endless number of homes or classrooms.
This solution is truly the best option for providing students with unique, hands-on STEM enrichment, no matter the environment.
The Individual STEM Kit Vision
Whether you’re sending safe, sanitized kits home with your learners through a pick-up/drop-off program or transporting their materials back and forth in blended programs, the Individual STEM Kits are the perfect solution to keeping student learning initiatives up-to-date and exciting. With curricula centered around hands-on lessons where students dive into robotics, programming, science experiments, video production and so much more, the Individual STEM Kits are developed to keep students attentive and interested. Education can blossom at home when you provide students with the tools they need.
The Individual STEM Kits fulfill STEM requirements, help supplement the programs feeling the pressure this upcoming semester and provide a large-scale learning solution for classrooms looking to bring self-guided learning to their students.
Such as the Discover Digits & Design kit aiding in tactile mathematics lessons, the Individual Kits can plug-and-play into any environment’s needs. Each kit is easily sanitized, keeping students safe, making them perfect for check-out systems where learners rotate through a multitude of science, technology, engineering, arts and math programs all year long. Each Individual STEM Kit contains all the materials needed to engage multiple learners over multiple semesters.
Ready to keep students engaged with lessons they’re actively interested in and turn idle time at home into a one-of-a-kind, hands-on learning experience? Contact PCS Edventures STEM Program Specialists to discuss your needs to build a solution that is right for your program.
Email: sales@edventures.com
Phone: (800) 429-3110
