K-12 students spend just 20% of their 16 waking hours in school. More than 80% of their time is spent learning outside of school—at afterschool and summer programs, in libraries, at home, or in the community. All students need opportunities to engage in quality STEM learning experiences. Afterschool and summer programs provide hands-on learning opportunities and a natural space for students to explore, learn, and grow. These programs spark students’ interest in STEM and computer science subjects, expose them to future careers, and support school-day learning, all while developing a new generation of problem solvers.
Training Opportunities
The Million Girls Moonshot provides a wide range of free training opportunities and webinars led by Moonshot implementation partners, researchers, and practitioners to share effective strategies, best practices, and resources to engage more girls in STEM and engineering. Webinars also enable participants from across the country to connect, collaborate, and learn from one another.
Past Trainings
Check out the event highlights for recent workshops:
STEM Resources
Nevada STEM Hub is a project of the Nevada Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology. Its goal is to collect and share STEM information from throughout our state to help students, parents, educators, businesses and community members better understand STEM and the opportunities a STEM education offers.
- Nevada STEM Hub
- Many Paths to a STEM Career
- For Corporate Partners – How to Support NV STEM Education
- Advocating for STEM in Nevada
- Nevada STEM Asset Map
- Asset Map Survey – Add Your STEM Resource!
FIRST Nevada is an organization promoting FIRST® robotics programs and STEM initiatives in Nevada. Their mission is to motivate youth to lead in science and technology by engaging in STEM activities that allow them to become well-rounded communicators and leaders, while building their self-confidence.
AUDIENCE: For Networks, Partners, and Programs
STEM Role Models
- Podcast: STEM Role Models – In this podcast, educators, CEOs, and students discuss why STEM role models from all walks of life are essential for young peoples’ persistence and success in STEM.
- Webpage: Role Models Matter and Mentoring Works! – The National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity believes that one of the most effective ways to encourage students to consider nontraditional careers is to introduce them to diverse role models, particularly role models. This webpage serves as a resource for educators seeking STEM role models and mentors for their students.
- Videos: Role Model Profiles Video Archives SciGirls CONNECTSciGirls CONNECT – Incorporating videos from diverse STEM role models into your afterschool program is a quick way to expose students to role models. Pair your engineering activity with a video from Rachel Gitajn, a bicycle engineer, or Tejal Desai, a biomedical engineer, so students can begin making connections between afterschool, the real-world, and career.
- Posters: STEM Role Models Posters — In 7 Additional Languages – Download inspirational, diverse STEM Role Models posters for your school or afterschool program — now in 8 additional languages including Chinese, Spanish, and French.
Broadening Participation in STEM
- Book: Youth Development in Out-of-School Time Setting (2018) – Comprehensive book on youth development in out-of-school time settings. It includes a chapter on 10 principles of effective youth development.
AUDIENCE: For Programs, Youth and Families
APPLICATION: Share the following engineering activities with programs and families for additional STEM learning in your state.
- Student Activity: How High Can a Super Ball Bounce? – In this activity students explore how engineers might use elasticity of material to help them design products. Working in pairs, they drop bouncy balls from a meter height and determine how high they bounce. Youth measure, record and repeat the process to gather data to calculate average bounce heights and coefficients of elasticity.
- Engineering Design Activities on Curiosity Machine – Sign up for hundreds of FREE Technovation Engineering Design Activities with facilitation instructions and videos featuring STEM professionals and mentors.
- Student Activities: Girlstart STEM at Home was created by Girlstart to empower families and communities in STEM. Find free Girlstart curriculum, STEM resources, effective messaging tips, collaboration opportunities. Join the Girlstart newsletter and receive updated information on other online resources.
- Student Activities: EngineerGirl Try This! Design Challenge are hands-on activities using common household items. Challenges include: design a mini catapult, paper airplane, and sorting machine.
There are many STEM and engineering curricula, programs, and activities available. We consulted with Dr. Christine Cunningham, engineering education expert, and her team to create a curated catalog of STEM and engineering resources.
The STEM Resource Catalog is a non-exhaustive curated collection of STEM and engineering resources. We will be adding to and modifying the catalog during the first year of the Moonshot Initiative. The catalog is for internal use only by the Statewide Afterschool Networks.
You can filter the catalog by grade level, audience, STEM discipline, learning environment, cost, engineering mindset features, or pathway categories.
- Mission Unstoppable: The Science Behind Surfing
- Mission Unstoppable: Training With the U.S. Women’s National Team
- Mission Unstoppable: Using Science to Make Sports Safer
- Yamilée Toussaint-Beach Activity Sheet and Educator Guide
- Ellie Maybury Activity Sheet and Educator Guide
- Monica Rho Activity Sheet and Educator Guide
- US Soccer: High Performance 101
- On-the-Job: Dawn Scott
- On-the-Job: Sarah Wilson
- Family Activity Workbooks – STEM.Teaching.Kit_for_Web.pdf Great activities from the Boston Children’s Museum. Hands-on, minds-on activities are broken in categories: science, technology, engineering, and math.
- Article: Educational Justice Starts with Equitable Family Engagement by Riddhi Divanji, Ella Shahn, and Sydney Parker
- Designing surveys and sharing data with a wide range of stakeholders results in a deeper understanding of the data from multiple perspectives.
- Article: ‘I’m not just a mom’: Parents as creators, collaborators, and learners in creative computing by Ricarose Roque
- Social support from parents can play an important role in engaging and sustaining young people’s participation in computing. The authors identified many supportive roles for parents, including collaborating with their children on projects, providing resources and finding new opportunities.
- Webinar Recording: Listen, Learn, Lead webinar by Flamboyan Foundation
- Speakers discuss what they are hearing through their ongoing work with families, particularly their Black and Brown families facing the intersecting crises of racism and COVID-19. We hope this webinar will help spark concrete ideas to engage your most important stakeholders – students, families, and educators – in an ongoing way.
- NASA Space Place – NASA Science for Kids – Activities include an art challenge, Color Your Universe, and How Far Away is the Moon?
- Education at home | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa.gov) – Citizen science, hands-on activities, mobile resources and more. STEM at your fingertips teaches about climate, weather, more.
- 50+ Awesome Engineering Projects for Kids – Left Brain Craft Brain – Fun building (engineering) activities for kids using simple materials found at home like boxes, rubber bands, and paper towel tubes.
- Take Flight – Using everyday materials, youth engineer a glider that can fly straight for 15 feet.
- Keep Your Cool! Design Your Own Cooler Challenge – Youth design a cooler that will keep a bottle of water cool using the engineering design process. They test their prototype and graph their results to determine the effectiveness of the solution.