Today’s guest blogger is Kate Sokol, a curriculum designer for EiE.

This past March, a small EiE crew—a film producer, a sound engineer, and a handful of EiE curriculum developers—traveled across the country to explore NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), interview NASA engineers, and create a video introducing middle-school-aged youth to the field of remote sensing for our upcoming Engineering Everywhere unit Worlds Apart: Engineering Remote Sensing Devices.

Summer time is STEM time! Out-of-school-time educators can use our OST curricula, Engineering Everywhere and Engineering Adventures, in their summer programs—and parents can have a blast with STEM activities this summer, too! The EiE team can’t overstate the value of continuing to engage children in STEM activities when school isn’t in session. Check out some cool resources we found from parents, educators, and engineering enthusiasts to keep the STEM fun going all year long!

Have you used Engineering Everywhere (EE), EiE’s out-of-school-time program for youth in grades 6–8? This free-to-download curriculum empowers youth to become engineers and solve problems that are personally meaningful and globally relevant. EE units engage the youth in your OST program with context-setting videos, articles about real-world technologies, and exciting design challenges. If you’re curious, why not dip your toes into the water with Go Fish: Engineering Prosthetic Tails? It’s an EE unit that challenges youth to become biomechanical engineers as they design prosthetic devices that help animals in need. 

The pilot testing interest form is currently closed, but keep an eye on our blog and newsletter for Digital Storybooks project updates.

Last summer, EiE curriculum developers kicked off an exciting new initiative: EiE Digital Storybooks. As our August 2016 blog post describes, this project is an effort to better accommodate educators and learners by integrating our storybooks into a digital platform. Through collaboration with our outside partner, Alipes, these new storybooks are fully customizable. Educators can choose between abridged and unabridged versions while easily turning on or off features like vocabulary supports, discussion questions, and interactive animations. At EiE, we test our new products thoroughly to best ensure that by the time they reach the classroom, educators have a reliable product that works. We depend greatly on the feedback from educators and experts in the field. This fall, we are looking for classroom teachers to pilot test our digital storybooks. Click here to sign up for pilot testing and read below for more information about this exciting initiative.

A few weeks ago, we asked you to complete a reader survey. We were blown away by our readers' enthusiastic response! You gave us tons of great information that will help us make the blog and newsletter even better for you. You also asked some excellent questions about the blog, newsletter, EiE curriculum, and everything in between. We wanted to make sure we shared the answers with all of our readers!