8644

We began doing more pop-up events in inner city Boston neighborhoods. We found that at these events, the kids were very attentitive and really wanted to learn. When our outreach robot wasn't working, we expected failure, but the kids were still engaged and helpful and even tried to help us fix it.

Starting last spring we attended a number of “mainstream” outreach events such as MIT Science Saturday and the Children’s Museum Tinker Tent, as well as a series of programs at the Meadowbrook School, a private school in Weston. While these events were fun, we realized that these kids had lots of opportunity for STEM education, and we wanted to focus on inner city communities where they had less exposure.

Last year we worked on developing our actual curriculum. We knew it would have to be a cheap, easy program that also taught young kids about engineering. We decided to create paper electronics kits which are do it yourself electrical circuits. We have instruction kits for magic wands (tilt sensor), light-up masks (parallel circuit), robot finger puppets (switch), and customizable paper airplanes. They cost about 40 cents per student.