Engaging Families in STEM Programme
Year Awarded
2021
Amount
€9,000
- Organisation:Kildare County Council
- Audience:Primary Students, Parents
- Format:Informal Education
- Location:Kildare
Project Summary
Creating opportunities for family engagement in STEM is vital in order to leverage the strong influence parents have on their child’s interests and academic pursuits and to enable them to support their child’s engagement with STEM. This programme will offer a series of hands-on family STEM workshops aimed at engaging children and their parent in STEM learning together. This intergenerational approach will offer an opportunity to demystify STEM topics for parents, to highlight their importance and future career possibilities and to raise their own confidence by exploring technologies and concepts with their children that they may previously have had little to no experience of.
The programme will see a series of three family STEM workshops run in each of the 7 full time library branches in County Kildare ensuring widespread access to families throughout the county. Each workshop will be underpinned by the common themes of: hands-on interaction with the STEM learning; information on education and career pathways; and an introduction to positive STEM role models with a particular emphasis on positive female role models to dispel gender stereotypes in STEM careers. The workshops will focus on three distinct STEM topics:
– Robotics and artificial intelligence
– 3D printing, design and application
– A science experiment lab taster covering biology, chemistry and physics experiments.
This programme will help empower parents to support their children in engaging with STEM and in steering children towards STEM-related education and careers.