According to a press release, Discovery Education presents a curated collection of engaging, high-quality digital learning resources to students and teachers for National STEM Day. Held annually on November 8th, National STEM Day unites communities in celebrating the importance of teaching science, technology, engineering, and math to students in grades K-12. Discovery Education is the worldwide edtech leader whose state-of-the-art digital platform supports learning wherever it takes place.
Discovery Education offers hundreds of no-cost resources tailored to STEM teaching and learning that ignite student curiosity. Among the resources created in collaboration with leading social impact partners now available to support observances of National STEM Day are:
Engaging Classroom Activities
Catalyze effective STEM instruction with resources from the STEM Careers Coalition™– the first-of-its-kind national STEM initiative powered by corporate and non-profit leaders and anchored in schools by Discovery Education. These activities span a broad range of STEM topics, introduce students to STEM leaders, and feature important skills, as well as step-by-step guides for implementing activities in lesson plans.
The STEM Careers Coalition is celebrating its fourth-year anniversary with new resources from partners. To date, the STEM Careers Coalition has reached more than 7.2 million students in its mission to solve critical gaps in diverse representation in the STEM professional workforce. The Coalition is an alliance of industries and non-profit organizations, providing educators and students with equitable access to STEM resources and career connections since the launch in 2019. The Coalition will continue to ignite student curiosity and influence a diverse future STEM workforce and reach 10 million teachers and students by 2025. In 2023, the Coalition welcomed new members such as Charles River, LyondellBasell and Nucor. View the complete list of STEM Career Coalition partners here.
Professional Learning
Most U.S. high schools do not currently offer biotechnology classes, limiting students’ ability to gain the skills and experiences necessary for careers in science and medicine. To support educators looking to infuse biotechnology into their teaching practice, Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, partnered with Discovery Education to create Futurelab+, a comprehensive, two-year curriculum that includes hands-on labs, interactive resources, and career exploration tools. One of those tools, the Master Class series, shows how three educators have brought biotechnology into their classrooms. Through the series, other educators can discover how to introduce biotechnology principles in diverse learning environments by empowering students to solve real-world problems and creating inclusive instructional spaces.
Classroom Activities
See innovation in action with a series of Virtual Site Tours hosted by Boeing. Students will be transported around the U.S. to visit unique Boeing facilities, where they’ll learn more about the people and products leading the way to the future of air travel. Each video is paired with a companion activity that incorporates project-based learning, student collaboration, and hands-on STEM problem-solving. This new series is part of FUTURE U, an award-winning program with Boeing that provides standards-aligned, hands-on, experiential learning resources that ignite excitement and inspire students to become tomorrow’s innovators.
Explore curriculum connectors and student-facing presentations using real-world data from sources like Nielsen, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Census Bureau to support ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies instruction for grades 6-12. This series of teaching tools that leverage data as a problem-solving tool is from Discover Data—a data literacy initiative powered by the Nielsen Foundation in collaboration with Discovery Education and the National AfterSchool Association.
Virtual Field Trips
Each immersive virtual experience features accompanying educator resources and student activities that make it easy for educators to grab, and sustain, student attention in STEM.
- Take students inside the labs at Illumina to explore cutting-edge sequencing technology that is being used to decode living things and revolutionize everything from medicine to agriculture to sustainability in the Genomics: Decoding the Language of Life Virtual Field Trip. Introduce students in grades 6-12 to an exciting and diverse group of individuals who are working on technology to improve lives and build a healthier future for our planet.
- STEAM Careers Take the Spotlight Virtual Field Trip: Country Music’s Biggest Night™ with CMA shows students in grades 6-12 how STEAM drives innovation in Country Music. This first-of-its-kind experience takes students behind the scenes of a major music event to discover the processes and people that make the televised production seem effortless. Students will meet the various STEAM professionals with diverse skills and backgrounds that help make Country Music’s Biggest Night™ a reality.
- Bridge to the Future: A Virtual Field Trip into Extended Reality with Verizon shows students the cutting-edge world of Extended Reality (XR) to discover how this innovative technology is redefining the world from entertainment to medicine to education and beyond. Students go to the Verizon Innovation Lab in Boston, Massachusetts to discover how new technologies are connecting people and redefining the possibilities of how we interact. Students will explore the differences between Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), and learn how XR is helping to revolutionize on-the-job training, gaming, entertainment, manufacturing, and more. This virtual field trip premieres November 9, 2023, at 1 PM ET. Register here.
- Take students in grades 4-12 on a virtual adventure into New York City’s newest and most forward-thinking neighborhood to explore new horizons in community building and a behind-the-scenes look at the amazing architecture and engineering innovations at Edge, the highest outdoor skydeck in the Western Hemisphere. The Future is Now Virtual Field Trip with Edge at Hudson Yards is part of an initiative from Edge at Hudson Yards and Discovery Education that catalyzes hands-on, experiential teaching and learning by giving classrooms nationwide a virtual pass to the neighborhood of the future.
Discover more National STEM Day resources from Discovery Education and partners here. These curated resources and more are available within Discovery Education Experience, the award-winning K-12 learning platform. Connecting educators to a vast collection of high-quality, standard-aligned content, ready-to-use digital lessons, intuitive quiz and activity creation tools, and professional learning resources, Discovery Education provides educators an enhanced learning platform that facilitates engaging, daily instruction.
“STEM is the force that powers our world. National STEM Day is the perfect time to integrate new STEM resources into lessons,” said Jackie Smalls, Vice President of Social Impact Coalitions at Discovery Education. “At Discovery Education, we remain committed to providing educators the highest-quality resources aligned to STEM standards that take learning to the next level.”
Source: Discovery Education
