Parents with young children are suddenly taking on a bigger teaching role due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Homeschooling for a few weeks has turned into months. Homeschooling might become the norm until America figures out how to have our freedom and be protected from this lethal virus. In the meantime, we hear from many parents of their trepidation in teaching STEM at home, fear of giving the wrong information, not being tech savvy or giving too much screen time. We hear you, and we are anxious too. We are mostly anxious about the widening inequality in education as we…

I wanted to write a piece about the second time I attended the Women In Toys Empowerment Day event in Dallas, TX. I have not attended any other toy industry inventor forum except this event, but I have been told that other such inventor events are mainly dominated by men. I am always amazed by the inventors (at the Women In Toys Empowerment Day) who are present to pitch to the toy companies and Walmart buyers. At this event, I noticed that many of the inventions at the Women In Toys Empowerment Day shared a common theme of education and…

I have recommended several children’s STEM books that I enjoy reading to my students. The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 moon landing made space a big topic of conversation. There are so many children’s books about the universe, galaxies, planets, moon and space travel (fiction and nonfiction). Finding a book that kids enjoy listening to for 7–14 minutes (the length young kids’ attention span) is almost like finding a diamond in the rough.

After several weeks of talking about space, some kids were telling me they did not want to go to space or build a spaceship. Well, The Spacesuit…

What is play based learning and why is it such an important tool in early childhood education?

When children play there is more going on than children simply amusing themselves. Play is practice for life as children imitate grown-ups. They mimic adult work, social roles, and how adults interact with one another. “Playing” provides an opportunity to tap into their natural curiosity and explore areas of interest to them, motivating them to develop a positive attitude toward their learning from meaningful experiences that encourage them to develop lifelong skills. …

Cooperative learning theory is an offshoot of constructivism, the practice of building new knowledge upon the foundation of previous learning. It incorporates the idea that the best learning occurs when students, of mixed levels of ability, are actively engaged in the learning process and work in collaboration with other students to accomplish a shared goal. While constructivism focuses on personal experience as the foundation for learning new material, cooperative learning utilizes not only the student’s own experience to solidify knowledge, but also uses the experiences of others. Both theories emphasize the importance of interactivity with respect to the design and…

Rachael is one of the earliest contributors to Baby Monster Group. She has worked on the user experience and UI design of the software application for the Interactive Stage and the Baby Monster Group website. She has also contributed to the design and execution of the pilot after school program using Interactive Stage. Rachael is passionate about teaching STEM subjects to different ages, genders and backgrounds. Currently she is pursuing her Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction. She is a Seattle native, and has never driven a car in her life. …

If you know the answer to this question you’re probably a mathematician or math nerd and you’d find this mathematical definition fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_monster_group.

You might want to click on the link if you’ve never heard of the term Baby Monster Group, or that it was a mathematical term. But once you’ve tried to read through all the terminology, you might be thinking it all looks like Greek to me. And you wouldn’t be half wrong because Baby Monster Group is basically an algebraic term and Greek letters are used to represent algebraic terms in math.

A decade passed before Baby…

Of the several children’s coding books I have read recently, My First Coding Book by Kiki Prottsman is the book I would recommend to be in every school and library for elementary school students. The beauty of the book is its interactivity. Isn’t that what coding is about? I could imagine how a book like this could be made into a series of books focusing on different types of programming concepts.

My kindergartener loves this book because it has flaps, wheels and sliders. In general, she likes interactive books. I had to read the book with her, but she thought…