ISTE Members Gain Access to Discovery Ed STEM Content
- By Dian Schaffhauser
STEM Connect is a new Discovery Education product that provides STEM-oriented challenges for K-8 students to solve. Now, members of the International Society for Technology and Education (ISTE) will gain free access to the online service through July 31, 2019.
The challenges included in STEM Connect were inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges for Engineering. The idea is to encourage students to develop and apply solutions to real challenges facing the world. While elementary students take on personal, local problems in the curriculum, middle school students face more complex and global problems. For example, in one assignment students are asked to help somebody design a prosthetic for his sister, while in another they're asked to figure out how to build a well for a community in Kenya without easy access to water.
The program also includes "career connections," to teach learners about various STEM careers related to the activities they're working on. In some of the units, students connect with others around the world through "GlobalLab, an online laboratory, to share their data and work with others.
"Innovative services like Discovery Education's STEM Connect can play an important role in engaging students in teaching and learning, and we are proud to bring this robust digital resource to our members," said Richard Culatta, ISTE's CEO, in a statement.
ISTE members can learn more about their free access on this Discovery Education landing page. The two organizations said that Discovery will host a series of webinars to highlight the service's features and show how to integrate it into the classroom; the schedule will be posted on the landing page.
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org or on Twitter @schaffhauser.