With just six weeks left this year, talkSTEM invites everyone to join together to explore your homes, your neighborhoods, your spaces and lived experiences – and share! talkSTEM believes that connecting everyday experiences to STEM can boost creativity and problem-solving skills in children. Here are two specific ways we have thought of:
- Share Your #STEMlens (No matter where you live!)
- What’s your STEMlens? It’s the way you make sense of your activities and spaces as you integrate your science, technology, engineering, and math-related questions. It’s the questions you wonder about. Your STEM mindset is influenced by your life’s experiences and is unique to you and we want you to share it! We want you to let your child / students know that they each have theirs and that it’s constantly evolving. How big of a slice of pie can each person get? How much wrapping paper will they need? Why is my shadow look different today than yesterday? The questions are endless and fascinating. Spark your child’s curiosity, challenge them to notice what’s around them and ask their questions. It’s fun to compare notes and to be inspired by each other.
- How can you share your #STEMlens? Easy – let’s leverage technology and social media. This fall we want to build a visual STEM library centered on these 4 themes:
- Food (use #STEMlensFood)
- Sports (use #STEMlensSports)
- Outdoors (use #STEMlensOutdoors)
- Art (use #STEMlensArt)
Our goal is to use social media to reach 10,000 children. More information is available here. We will share selected #STEMlens images on our website and to be considered for this, please complete this short form so we can attribute you correctly.
Young Professionals Group members, Women in Tech professionals, high school students, college students in STEM/STEAM programs, parents, teachers, other educators, and more – we invite you to participate in this virtual volunteering opportunity. Will you share at least three #STEMlens images form where you live and work? Or maybe you’d like to use some old pictures from vacations? Of course, we’d love for you to share as many as you’d like. This visual dictionary will serve all in the talkSTEM community to engage our youth – to show them the diversity that is STEM and to celebrate the beauty and fascination of our questions about the spaces we inhabit.
2. Family Explorers (for our Dallas area people)
- The second way we invite everyone in the Dallas area to enjoy the fall is to take a walk – and make it a walkSTEM tour of any one of the eight free, guided, self-paced walks we have designed for you. You can access your tour guides on YouTube and you can also use the freely downloadable, location-based travel app (iOS and android), Otocast with whom we are partnering to make our walks easily accessible. More information including a freely downloadable pdf with convenient links to each of our 70 walkSTEM stops is available here.
This year has been challenging, but we have an opportunity to continue to show our kids how exciting STEM can be! Let’s join together to create the world’s first visual STEM library – accessible to all, created by us all!
Dr. Koshi Dhingra has dedicated her career to STEM education and is passionate about having every child live up to their potential. Seeing a lack of girls and other underrepresented youth in STEM programs, she founded talkSTEM in 2015 to address the imbalance. She has a doctorate in science education from Teachers College, Columbia University, has years of experience teaching in graduate and undergraduate programs, and has held leadership roles in universities. She advises and collaborates with a broad range of educational institutions globally. Dr. Dhingra began her career teaching science in middle and high school in New York. She lives in Dallas, Texas with her husband, three children, and two dogs.
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