Making At-Home Learning Fun for All

Teachers, parents and students have been learning at home for weeks now and by this point, they have developed a certain routine.

How, though, do they keep routine from turning into quarantine drudgery?

NC State’s Science House, a statewide STEM outreach effort housed within the College of Sciences, has developed the online resources to keep that from happening through Science House Express.

The weekly K-12 virtual learning center focuses on a different field of science each week and provides engaging online learning materials, do-at-home activities and in-depth interviews with noted scientists.

“As educators and parents ourselves we know just how hard it can be to try to do it all during this difficult time,” says Science House Director Jason Painter. “We developed this so that users can build lessons around certain STEM topics or simply drop in to do a quick experiment.”

New content is released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Last week’s lesson, “It IS Rocket Science,” is archived with its virtual activities, lesson plans and interviews, gathered from NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other established science-based learning resources.

This week’s topic “Data, Data Everywhere,” is also available, with a new scientist interview on the topic available on Friday.

Future topics include food science, communication in science and citizen science.

“The great thing about STEM is the wide variety of topics,” Painter says. “We’re capitalizing on that to pull together fun engaging content to make at-home learning more exciting and less routine.

“Our at-home experiments and chats with scientists allow students to not only hear about fun things scientists are doing but to actually join in on it.”