Grant to bring engaging engineering education to pre-K and elementary school teachers in the Bay Area
December 15, 2015, Sausalito, CA – Today it was announced that the Bay Area Discovery Museum has been awarded $380,000 from 100Kin10 to fund a mobile engineering lab to serve the Bay Area’s pre-K through fifth grade classrooms.
100Kin10 is an organization committed to recruiting, training and retaining 100,000 excellent science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers by 2021. This is the inaugural year of an annual STEM Fellowship Program which awards grants to participants developing programs designed to tackle one of the “Grand Challenges” in education identified through extensive field research and feedback from 100Kin10’s network of more than 200 partners. This year’s focus is the underrepresentation of engineering in K-12 classrooms.
The Bay Area Discovery Museum has been granted $380,000 by 100Kin10 to fund a new mobile engineering lab, to deliver engaging and developmentally appropriate engineering curriculum to pre-K through fifth grade teachers in all nine Bay Area counties, with an emphasis on educators in underserved communities. Through the mobile engineering lab, the Museum will bring its robust engineering programming to children throughout the Bay Area who might not otherwise have access and for whom STEM education is critical to closing the opportunity gap. The mobile lab will also bring novelty and interest to engineering, and professional development to teachers without release time. The Museum will commence research and development for the mobile engineering lab in January 2016, with piloting to begin in January 2017.
“We are thrilled and honored to receive this substantial investment and validation from 100Kin10, an organization we deeply respect for its innovative and effective approach to education,” says Karyn Flynn, CEO of the Bay Area Discovery Museum. “Our mobile engineering lab will provide teachers with the resources they need to engage children in engineering and develop critical problem solving skills.”
The 100Kin10 Fellowship is designed to build a community of problem solvers to overcome specific obstacles in the STEM teaching and learning domain. By putting learning and human-centered problem-solving at the forefront, the Fellowship guides participants through a process of iteration and improvement of ideas, resulting in stronger proposed solutions, in advance of applying for funding.
100Kin10 awarded $1.9 million in total grants to 11 organizations. Other recipients include Baltimore City Public Schools; Bank Street College of Education and Tufts School of Engineering; Boston University College of Engineering; Hillsborough County Public Schools; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; National Center for Technology Literacy at the Museum of Science Boston; Teach for America New York; Texas Regional Collaborative (TRC); University of Texas Austin; and Washington STEM.
About the Bay Area Discovery Museum
Located in Sausalito, CA, the Bay Area Discovery Museum annually welcomes 300,000 children, parents, and teachers to its early childhood education campus. The mission of the Museum is to ignite and advance creative thinking for all children. Our goal is to reach 1 million children a year – onsite at the Museum, in the community, and nationally through our research-based Center for Childhood Creativity – and give them a better start to life.