Yesterday the building was pretty empty at Grant Wood. I worked on collecting STEM career video clips. I am going to do my best to make it easy for the Grant Sites to show a couple of career clips a week in order to expose the students to as many STEM careers as possible. I want to put a screen shot of a couple of websites on the CSI Grant Recipients' resource website, but I don't know if I can legally do that, so I wrote to Stacy Beimer and I'm waiting for a response on that question. I also worked on a way to explain the 'Catching the Wind' EIE kit, since I have the Braille school getting ready to use it and also the ELP in Mt. Vernon. I made some Power Point slides that feature the elements of the kit and the elements of all EIE kits. We'll have to do some EIE kit training, so I was killing two birds with one stone as I became more familiar with the whole kit (we had done part of it for the U.S.A. Science Expo, and may be able to use some of what I did for that. Erica seemed willing to help with this, so I'm hoping we can plan that soon.
Today I worked on the Grant Recipients' website, and then met with one of the teachers in Mount Vernon who wanted help with the Invention Fair. I told her that I'd be willing to help with support for the students who don't have help at home in planning inventions, with a little after school club. She wanted to have her kids plan the Invention Fair and have them advertise too, so I helped her with the details she'd need to know to plan and execute it. This is a non-competitive event that I've run for many years. I suggested that she might want to apply for a STEM grant next year, too, with her interest in after school science. I showed her the EIE kit list, and we talked about how that might fit in. I had worked Monday on a list of links for STEM related topics, and one of my lists was links on inventions, and I will be sharing that with her also, because she asked for videos that might help spark interest and curiosity. I look forward to working with her on this even more, and I told her I could come help if she had an after school group of kids (that didn't have support at home to do an invention project).
