As I discussed in the first part of this series, there are many great reasons to get started with virtual reality in your classroom. The immersive experience is like nothing else—to me, it really feels like futuristic technology in our students' hands. Engagement skyrockets when we have the VR goggles out. 

There are numerous teaching tools and instructional strategies to go along with this experience that are easy for teachers to access. While on a VR tour, teachers can prompt students to look at different landmarks or details of the environment. There are both self-guided student experiences as well as others that the teacher leads the students through, depending on the objectives of the lesson.

When we discuss STEM classes and content, by their very nature, we are talking about multiple cross-curricular concepts. Engineering is math and math leads to technology, which requires science, which is what engineers study, and so on and so forth. So why should we consider how STEM concepts can branch out even further into our classrooms?

You’ve probably heard of STEM—you may even teach STEM in your classroom. The key to students’ success is not only to learn science, technology, engineering, and math, but also to understand how those disciplines apply to the world around them. Students need to develop the critical skills that will prepare them for beyond the classroom, enabling them to be tomorrow’s engineers and innovators.

Robotics has become a popular activity for incorporating STEM in the classroom. Among other things, robots are engaging, eye-catching, dynamic, and more interesting than a book for capturing and holding a student’s attention. Unfortunately, the vast majority of classroom robots end up being little more than toys made to drive to and fro or side to side without really providing an opportunity for any scientific exploration and learning. When selecting robotic products to introduce in the classroom, it is important to look at the overall educational value of the system—particularly with regard to how it can be used to promote scientific exploration and learning together with the application of mathematic principles.

This year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. While it is easy to focus only on Apollo 11, this celebration of human achievement actually began in a somber way when we commemorated 50 years since the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, which occurred back in January of 1967. We moved on to remembering the first manned Apollo 7 mission from October 1968, and the audacious Apollo 8 flight to the moon in December of that same year. Apollo 9 cleared the way by testing the lunar lander in Earth orbit in March of 1969. Apollo 10 proved our ability to rendezvous in lunar orbit in May, which all led to the big event on July 20, 1969 when humans first set foot on the moon.

STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is one of the biggest education trends of the decade. With an estimated 2.4 million STEM jobs that were unfilled by the end of 2018, it’s more important than ever to promote curiosity in these subjects so students will choose valuable STEM careers.

Teachers try to balance many different elements while planning lessons. Content standards, interest level of students, high levels of rigor, prior knowledge, and empowering and engaging student learning all play a role as teachers are determining how to structure a lesson. As teachers think about increasing relevance in the classroom and applying critical thinking strategies, they can look no further than the current debate about climate change in our world—a topic that meets most, if not all, of the criteria listed above.

On May 3, we celebrated the fourth Boxlight STEM Day (#BLSTEM) in conjunction with TAG-Ed’s Georgia STEM Day (#GASTEMDay). Students around Georgia, as well as several locations in Latin America, participated in lessons conducted with the Boxlight Labdisc. STEM Day is a hands-on, inquiry-based learning event designed to help students discover critical STEM skills and understand how STEM disciplines apply to the world around them. Lessons ranged in topics from heart rate and light absorbance to Newton’s second law.

There are initiatives all across the country in the field of education and in industry that encourage girls to consider joining STEM-related occupations as adults. This is a great idea as a female perspective is highly valuable in these areas. The question is, how do we support young girls to make this happen?

In the previous century, computer science and computer coding was left to a few highly trained individuals. There was a level of expertise and skill needed to “speak the language” of computer science—for most people, it was a foreign language.

As we embark deeper into the technological age, we are finding that the language of computer coding is not a “foreign language” anymore. K-12 schools have worked to introduce coding earlier and earlier into the curriculum. Education organizations like www.code.org provide amazing resources for teachers to be able to cover this subject matter.