Our high-quality suite of STEM enrichment activities for clubs, camps, and STEM specials.
Launch-off with our Engineering Rescue Shuttles activity. Credit: B. Logan.
We’re thrilled to announce YES Enrichment—our newest suite of hands-on STEM activities designed to be used in any enrichment setting, including before-, during-, and after school. YES Enrichment (formerly “YES Out-of-School”) provides flexible, engaging content that can be adapted to fit various program needs, ensuring valuable learning experiences for students. The core unit includes five activities that provide youth with a cohesive engineering experience. Five optional activities extend learning.
Real-World, Relevant, and Built to Support Literacy Skills
Students navigate the engineering design process as they work towards solving a specific problem that resonates with them. Centering activities around real issues that matter to students ensures their investment in thinking critically both about their world and the impact on their community.
The YES Equity-Oriented Engineering Learning Approach (left) and Engineering Design Process (right).
YES curriculum focuses on building students’ engineering identities and language skills. The hands-on nature of engineering allows students to immerse themselves in problem-solving and contextualizes vocabulary in authentic engineering practices. Activities are also anchored on a set of dimensions, which in addition to authentic engineering practices, include socially engaged engineering, asset-based pedagogies, and engineering identities. As students progress through the engineering design process, so do their language skills, with support from embedded language scaffolding, stories, and multi-modal learning.
Students test their Sock Assistive Devices designs. Credit: K. Bateman.
Beyond being hands-on, fun, and engaging, YES Enrichment embeds opportunities for students to foster skills transferable outside of engineering. Persisting through failure to improve designs is central to the engineering design process and encourages students to become resilient and innovative. Using a structured-problem-solving process and documenting their journey through engineering notebooks can help students with executive functioning skills (i.e., organization and communication). The intentional use of pairs and small groups helps students become better collaborators, improving their communication skills and flexibility. As a result, YES Enrichment curriculum can help improve students’ academic and social skills while they develop an engineering identity.
Thanks to the generous assistance of the National Science Foundation, YES Enrichment units—which contain educator guides, implementation slides, student notebooks, and more—are available to download for free. More are on the way: be amongst the first to know about them by signing up here.
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Curious about how we support educators in the classroom? Find out in this interview with YES & EiE’s Founding Director and the Director of Professional Learning.
Learn what happens when YES & EiE partner with National Grid to further STEM education in this article.
