Generating Excitement for STEM

Welcome to BSA STEM Resources, an unofficial, local website with materials for BSA's new STEM Initiative by folks in Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council.  This past weekend, our council held its annual University of Scouting, at which we offered our first-ever, two-hour STEM orientation for Cub Scout Leaders.  Since our session was immediately after lunch, when a PowerPoint presentation usually just puts everyone to sleep, we opted to start right out with the activity portion of the orientation.  We set up four stations, one for each STEM area, broke the class into groups of 4-5 each, and had folks visit all the stations in round robin fashion, spending 20-25 minutes at each station.  At the science station, they did whale blubber experiments, learned about Bernoulli's Principle, and saw a demo of a flame tornado.  At the technology station, they learned about Morse code and made a simple circuit.  At the engineering station, they built models of Leonardo's transportable bridge.  At the mathematics station, they learned how to find their weight on other planets using slide rules.  With time extremely tight at the end, we managed to squeeze in a very brief slide presentation on the overall structure of the STEM program.  Some of these materials are already posted elsewhere on this site, and the rest will be coming soon.  Thank you to all of our enthusiastic participants!  You will definitely be fantastic STEM ambassadors for our youth!