April 2020

This week’s K-12 package highlights invention once more as we join with Lemelson-MIT to announce their 2020 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winners who are recognized for their technology-based inventions as graduate students or undergraduate teams in one of four prize categories: “Cure it!,” “Eat it!,” “Move it!,” and “Use it!.” To celebrate these awards, we have released another package of fun invention activities and videos called Inventing Matters!

This week, we want you to consider why inventing is important and how you can do it yourself. Take a look through the different categories to try out different activities related to language, music, food, shoe design, and more! We also encourage you to learn about the current and past collegiate winners and InvenTeam grant recipients whose inventions exemplify the prize categories and to use project-based learning activities to find that opportunities for invention are everywhere!

Don’t forget that you can share your invention ideas using our forums or on social media using #MITFullSTEAM (with parent permission).

Have fun inventing!

Come wonder with us! This week we have a collection of ideas and questions that we’ve collected about everyday things. What does morning taste like? What sounds make you smile? What do your favorite pair of shoes feel like when they are on your feet? What does the light look like at different times during the day? What is one smell that makes you worry?

We encourage you to spend this week thinking about the questions you have about your surroundings, the Earth and sky, and about yourself! What observations can you make about the world around you? Can you find something in or around your home that you think is special or unique? How would you demonstrate to someone else what you’ve picked?

How many questions about our world can you come up with after a week of making observations? We can’t wait to see what you discover and hope that you will share your observation journey using either our forums or on social media using #MITFullSTEAM (with parent permission).

The Edgerton Center K-12 Maker team is creating Week 4, Making Music and Sounds for release Monday April 13.

In this open-ended exploration of sound and music, students will listen and investigate, tinker and make noise, and turn sound into music with their own instrument. Learning like this happens best in a community, and we are providing a moderated forum where students can share and enjoy noisy compositions and musical creations from the community.  Get a taste of our projects – watch the Make a Kitchen Symphony video

The open-ended projects are intended to take a little pressure off of parents, give kids permission to learn through play, and let learners spend more time digging into the favorite parts of the project. Hopefully, adults will get in on the joy of making noise.

We get that there are many families who don’t have access to online resources, and will not be able to access this curriculum.  These materials will continue to be available when we return to our schools and educators can use them in face-to-face activities.