Teachers will find many useful lessons on STEM on Station. The STEM Lessons from Space page is organized by topic: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The Learning Launchers page has "Teacher Toolkits" focusing on research and activities going on at the International Space Station (ISS). Each month there's a featured theme with previous topics archived in a list. As with STEM Lessons from Space, each Learning Launcher feature contains a few lessons along with other supplemental resources.
These lessons and resources are great for teachers looking for ways to connect the science that kids are learning to the ISS. Many of the activities are lab activities that vary in the degree of inquiry, student-led experimenting, and critical thinking that are involved. Most lessons give plenty of background for the teacher and information about standards. However, many lessons were created before the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), so teachers may need to figure out their own NGSS correlations.
Continue readingSTEM on Station is a NASA website devoted to learning about the International Space Station (ISS), including the process of how it was built, the science and research related to the ISS and space, astronauts on the ISS, and more. This reference site has a lot of articles, videos, and lesson plans for teachers that are loosely organized by the pages listed in the navigation sidebar. Each page displays content as a running feed, jumbling articles, videos, resources, and lessons all together, through which you scroll to see all of the content.
Most of the resources seem to be for educators and include lesson plans, video playlists, background info, and related web resources. There's a smaller section that's geared toward students, to help them explore the space station, get involved with the station, watch Q&A sessions with astronauts, and find out how to spot the station from home.
STEM on Station is a good place to learn about the ISS, with a variety of resources for kids to use. The articles vary in complexity; all have at least one image and sometimes a few vocabulary definitions at the end. The videos include useful computer animations, real-time demos and interviews with ISS astronauts, and promos about the benefits of the space station to humanity. While there are a few spotlights on female scientists and astronauts, many of the resources give little representation to people from different racial backgrounds.
The biggest downside of STEM in Station is the organization. The feed seems great if kids are just on the site for the purpose of exploring. But if they're trying to find specific info about the station, there's no easy way to see all of the topics and resources available in one place. While there's a search box, you'll get results from the whole NASA site. The navigation menu sometimes changes depending on what you click, and some of the links take you to other NASA pages or outside websites without an easy way to find your way back to Stem on Station.