STEM-tastic Adventures: Tips, Tricks, Cheats

STEM-tastic Adventures: Code, Build & Explore for Early Learners!

Embark on STEM-tastic Adventures and guide a charming robot to efficiently build with blocks and navigate city paths, delivering gifts to eager recipients! This innovative app, along with its related hands-on activities (coming soon for home and classroom), was meticulously co-designed with preschool educators, families, media and curriculum developers, and researchers. These resources seamlessly integrate traditional learning activities with digital engagement, fostering developmentally appropriate computational thinking, mathematics, and science skills and practices across both school and home environments. Research clearly demonstrates that utilizing these digital resources and hands-on activities significantly helps children grasp important computational thinking and STEM concepts.

Two Engaging Games for STEM Exploration:

STEM-tastic Adventures allows children (recommended for preschoolers, ages 3-6) to play two distinct yet interconnected games, both available on mobile platforms:

• Better Building: In this game, children sort and label blocks to help build structures more efficiently, introducing concepts of organization and classification.
• City Walk: Children provide a precise sequence of directions to deliver gifts to happy recipients throughout the city, developing their understanding of algorithms and spatial reasoning.

Each of these adventures promotes crucial computational thinking skills while actively engaging with relevant mathematics concepts and scientific practices.

Skills Developed Through Play:

City Walk Promotes:

• Computational Thinking: Children learn to identify a precise set of steps or instructions to achieve a goal or solve a problem. They also practice identifying errors and determining how to fix them (debugging).
• Math Concepts: Players provide directional commands that allow others to navigate pathways, using essential spatial vocabulary such as left, right, forward, and backward.

Better Building Promotes:

• Computational Thinking: Kids learn to label groups of objects by identifying important information that should be highlighted in the label while ignoring unnecessary details.
• Science Practices: Children identify characteristics that are similar and different across objects. They also determine criteria by which to sort objects and then sort objects into groups based on specific characteristics.

App Features for Optimal Learning:

• Multiple level gameplay to keep challenges fresh and engaging.
• Adaptive feedback that responds to the child's progress, guiding them effectively.
• Content based on research-based early learning trajectories, ensuring developmental appropriateness.

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