The STEM All Stars Clubs are spread internationally throughout the world providing many opportunities for underprivileged children in India to investigate concepts in STEM.
This unique and scalable model enables girls internationally to access STEM All Stars in their communities. The STEM All Stars clubs are powerful and highly motivated, which engage students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The motive of these clubs is to provide students with quality time to explore subjects in STEM. Clubs take place in secondary schools and usually support grade 3 to grade 8 students. Our founder, STEM Ambassadors, and the whole team works on providing internet, laptops, projectors, and other mandatory facilities for schools without these materials. Through our STEM Ambassadors, STEM All Stars launches clubs in each region. Our ambassadors’ focus is to introduce the unique STEM All Stars projects to a bigger audience and officially plant a club by talking to the principals, teachers, and the education directory board. Our founder, Sajni, also conducts weekly online Skype meetings to converse with club officers about their work. STEM All Stars has launched clubs in 65 schools by far!
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Click here to learn more about our STEM Ambassadors.
Getting Started
Clubs are individual to each school and there is no fixed formula for running one. There is however plenty of support available for those wanting to start a STEM club. If you are thinking about starting a STEM club for the first time, then have a look at our STEM Club’s guide for support on running our own club. That’s where we can help.
STEM Clubs Guide
To help you develop a club, we have produced a STEM clubs guide Step By Step Guide. You can read each step or skip to the relevant section that you need help with. Your regional STEM Ambassador can also help you through setting up a club. Click here to learn more about STEM Ambassadors.
Why STEM Clubs?
STEM clubs help girls gain skills, exposure, and access to the community around them.
- Skills — Incorporated into the clubs are all branches of STEM; however, the club’s focus more on engineering and computer science. Probably 98% of the things we deal with on a day to day basis are human-made, which our current curriculum does not cover at all. The human-made world focuses on only 2% of the experience. In addition, there has been a drastic decrease of women in computer science since 1990. Engineering and computer science solve real-world problems, and these branches of STEM are being neglected by our curriculums at school.
- Exposure —STEM All Stars clubs engage with the local STEM communities and providing unique opportunities to Club participants.
- Access to Community — As participants, girls have access to a supportive network of teachers, mentors, professionals, and peers.
Impact of the Clubs
The club is a key to the collaboration of STEM departments, teachers, students, friends, and the staff of the school by providing a forum for members to discuss STEM. STEM All Stars Clubs can strengthen relations between students and teachers, help gain confidence, and improve leadership skills. Children have different learning styles, such as auditory and visual. Sometimes children learn when they see what they are learning in terms of hands-on experiments. Students will learn to think like innovators, and they will do activities out of the regular school curriculum. He/she will be introduced to subjects that are being neglected by society as a whole-such as computer science and engineering. He/she will be able to create contextualized programs, use software(forex, Scratch, CAD, etc.), and build intriguing structures. Members will also gain soft skills such as leadership, collaboration, public speaking, and writing.
Club Project Ideas
Browse through a range of projects to support you in delivering exciting and inspiring activities both inside and outside of the classroom. Below is a list of ideas to get you started; however, you can generate your own!
- Grow crystals and learn about the science behind it.
- Use dry ice and bubbles to experiment with the concept of sublimation
- Use CAD software to build 2D and 3D shapes.
- Build an aquaponic for your school. Be environmentally friendly!
- Make oobleck using cornstarch and water and find out what’s interesting about this mixture
- Build an ROV(remotely operated vehicle). You could use a Lego Mindstorm kit for help!
- Construct a popsicle stick catapult
- Design a new toy out of any material you can find including legos, sticks, circuits, and more
- It is time to learn about symmetry! Build an icosahedron out of toothpicks and marshmallows/gumdrops/styrofoam. Not only icosahedron, but you could build any figure more than 11 sides! If you have Zometools, you could work with the kit to build bigger shapes!
- Make self-controlled robots out of cardboard pieces!
- Experiment with soda and how it pops when you open it! It’s time to read and research! See if you can make your own soda!
- Popsicle stick architecture, such as building bridges, Eiffel tower, mansion, or a house! If you can’t find popsicle sticks, use straws or any other simple material you can find!
- Make a battery from a potato or a lemon!
- Build a Rube Goldberg machine!
- Download Westpoint Bridge on your computer and build a bridge that works!
- Engineer an air-powered car (Hint: use a balloon)