STEAM Lab Resources

In 2019, the Maize Education Foundation awarded an $11,665 grant to Maize Elementary School for resources to create a STEAM program called “Stop Everything and STEAM.” This project met a need at the elementary school level because STEAM was not an actual class as part of the daily curriculum. With these resources, educators were able to design one day each month where all normal programming made way for students to rotate through a variety of STEAM activities.

Since then, with the help of bond funding, the district has refurbished rooms in each of our five elementary schools in order to provide dedicated STEAM labs for K-4 students. Generally speaking, bond funding is only available for structure and fixtures and cannot be used to purchase things like textbooks or other learning resources. That left most of these elementary schools without the resources needed to fully utilize their STEAM labs.

Following the success of Maize Elementary School’s “Stop Everything and STEAM” program, the Foundation set a goal to provide the remaining schools with resources in order to catch them up to Maize Elementary School so that all K-4 students in the Maize School District can access the same STEAM education resources.

Newly renovated STEAM Lab in need of learning resources.

 

Maize South Elementary School STEAM teacher Olivia Hugo receives funding for resources for the MSES STEAM Lab.

We started out by working with educators in each of our five elementary schools to identify their needs based on the list of resources included in the original Stop Everything and STEAM grant. That information was then used to create a matrix of needs and target funding - a total of approximately $45,000.

Our goals were broken into three tiers:

  • Tier One will ensure all elementary STEAM labs have equal sets of Snap Circuits, K’Nex, Keva Blocks, Magnatiles, and Plus-Plus kits.

  • Tier Two will ensure all the labs have the same sets of Dash Robots, Osmo Coding Bundles, and iPads (all sets of 12 for students to work in pairs or teams).

  • Tier Three will provide Bee Bots and Bloxels for each STEAM lab.

Since then, building leaders have worked with their own budgets as well as their incredible PTOs to fund some of these resources. In addition, as of January of 2023, MEF has since secured and delivered more than $11,200 toward this goal, which completes Tier 1 for all of our elementary schools.

We continue to seek funding support to complete this matrix - a current funding goal of $24,250.

 

Support Opportunities

Many of our schools are in need of resources to support STEAM and STEM education initiatives: robotics kits, coding, engineering concepts - and the list goes on!

If you would like to help support these kinds of programs and initiatives, please contact MEF Executive Director, Travis Bloom, to discuss ways you can help.

316.350.2029 | tbloom@usd266.com