About the store
The Vivify team is on a mission to re-engineer STEM education! We are dedicated to creating authentic, engaging, and accessible K-12 STEM lessons that progressively develop critical STEM skills, knowledge, and habits of mind. Designed by a team of educators and engineers, our lessons are low-prep and classroom-tested. Join the over 25,000 educators, and vivify your classroom today!
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Back to School STEM: 6 Icebreaker Teamwork Activities
Before tasking students to complete rigorous engineering design challenges, educators should start with Stage 1 STEM activities. Click here to learn more about the Stages of STEM.Stage 1 STEM activities are perfect icebreakers and team challenges to promote collaboration, teamwork, communication, and problem solving. They lay a critical foundation for more intensive STEM challenges. Working as a team, students will learn lessons in communication, innovation, hidden assumptions, and creativity t
PreK - 12th, Adult Education
Engineering
Also included in: Back to School (Stage 1 STEM) Bundle: 50+ Icebreaker Activities
Back to School Icebreakers: 5 Get To Know You Activities
Do you need a way to connect with your students for back to school? Are you looking to build a meaningful relationship that will last all year? Find the distance learning version of these activities here. This download includes 5 interactive icebreaker activities that will help educators get to know their students and build a strong relationship. Activities are centered around the theme of student sparks. Sparks were developed by the Search Institute, who explains them as follows: “Sparks ar
PreK - 12th, Adult Education
Engineering
NGSS
K-2-ETS1-2
, K-2-ETS1-3
, MS-ETS1-2
+7
Also included in: Back to School (Stage 1 STEM) Bundle: 50+ Icebreaker Activities
Tower STEM Challenges: 5 Icebreaker Activities
Towers are a great STEM activity to promote collaboration, teamwork, communication, and problem solving. This challenge lays a critical foundation for more intensive STEM challenges. Working as a team, they will learn lessons in communication, innovation, hidden assumptions, and creativity that are central to the engineering process. Click here for an editable STEM journal to use with distance learning, including digital and printable versions.These activities take no more than 20 minutes as th
K - 9th
Engineering
Also included in: Back to School (Stage 1 STEM) Bundle: 50+ Icebreaker Activities
Newspaper STEM Challenges: 3 Engineering Activities
Do you have a ton of newspapers and in need of some newspaper STEM challenges? Read below for three easy and progressively more challenging newspaper STEM challenges you can do right away! Click here for an editable STEM journal to use with distance learning, including digital and printable versions.These engineering design activities promote collaboration, teamwork, communication, and problem solving. This activities lay a critical foundation for more intensive STEM challenges. Working as a tea
K - 12th
Engineering
Also included in: Back to School (Stage 1 STEM) Bundle: 50+ Icebreaker Activities
STEM Creativity Tools: 5 Activities to Boost Brainstorming Power
Do you need a way to help your students brainstorm ideas? This download includes 5 exercises that provide student tools to help with generating solutions to a problem or ideas during any STEM activity. These tools include: reinterpreting, ideating, merging, debugging, and S.C.A.M.P.E.R. For each tool there is an editable student handout for the activity as well as editable accompanying teacher slides. These tools can be used over and over again throughout the year to practice creative problem-s
2nd - 12th
Engineering
Also included in: Year-Round STEM Engineering Challenges Bundle (Middle School STEM)
Back to School Icebreakers: Build Relationships during Distance Learning
Do you need a way to connect with your students for back to school? Are you looking to build a meaningful relationship that will last all year? Do you need ideas for maintaining relationships during distance learning? This download includes interactive icebreaker activities that will help educators get to know their students and build a strong relationship in a distance learning environment with modifications for using Google Slides, Seesaw, Flipgrid, and take-home packets. Activities are cen
2nd - 12th, Adult Education
Engineering
Also included in: Back to School (Stage 1 STEM) Bundle: 50+ Icebreaker Activities
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About the store
Experience
The Vivify team is on a mission to re-engineer STEM education! We are dedicated to creating authentic, engaging, and accessible K-12 STEM lessons that progressively develop critical STEM skills, knowledge, and habits of mind. Designed by a team of educators and engineers, our lessons are low-prep and classroom-tested. Join the over 25,000 educators, and vivify your classroom today!
Teaching style
STEM transforms classrooms into an exciting world of curiosity, problem-solving, and creativity. Successful STEM education is an empowering interdisciplinary approach that brings math, science, and engineering concepts to life through challenging opportunities that mimic the complexities and excitement of the real world.
In our STEM classrooms, students apply math and science to a problem, using the engineering design process through technology. Our lessons follow the 3 Stages of STEM philosophy:
Stage 1 includes activities like tower challenges where students learn how to work together and develop essential habits of mind.
Stage 2 is where you introduce the engineering design process and add math and science, then use technology to solve a problem.
Stage 3 consists of longer, more complex challenges with a research component. In this stage, students solve a more open-ended problem and there is typically a final project that they present.
My own education history
Vivify is a STEM education company that is co-founded by Natasha Wilkerson and Claire Meschkat, two aerospace engineers turned educators who live in Texas.
Claire is a Pre-K thru 9th grade STEM teacher and STEM program coordinator at a Texas private school. She specializes in developing engineering curricula for elementary and middle school grades including the STEM Explorers series. Claire has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and a Masters of Education in Educational Psychology - Creativity & Cognition from Texas A&M University. Before Vivify, she worked as an aerospace engineer at Boeing Commercial Airlines, Boeing Space Exploration, & Air Tractor, Inc.
Natasha is the founder of Space Club, a K-8 informal STEM program that is now an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit, the Cosmic Leap Foundation. Natasha specializes in research and development of engineering curricula and programming for middle school. Natasha has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from Texas A&M University. Before Vivify, Natasha worked as an engineer for the United States Department of the Navy in radar and satellite spectrum management.
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