Ask any STEM educator about the biggest challenges they face, and there’s a good chance their answer will include two things: lack of time and lack of student engagement. Both time and engagement can feel like scarce resources, right? The problem isn’t that kids lack interest in science and math, it’s that traditional classroom environments can be limiting, sometimes even stifling, for both students and teachers.
For the past seven years, talkSTEM has utilized a tool called the walkSTEM. Developed by our CEO, Dr. Koshi Dhingra, a teacher and philosopher of education with over 30 years of classroom experience, walkSTEM tours are inquiry-and-place-based explorations that help students notice the STEM in their own backyard (or classroom, local museum, park, or– well, frankly anywhere).
Learn more about the walkSTEM process, and check our video library of tours.
Once students see STEM in the places around them and in themselves, they can see themselves in STEM. talkSTEM was founded on the belief that every young person has the potential to engage in math and science, to passionately pursue math and science in the classroom, in their extracurriculars, or even as a career. Developing each student’s “STEM identity” breaks down educational barriers, creating an inclusive and level playing field where every young person has the opportunity to engage and succeed.
While a walkSTEM tour is a great attention-grabbing tool, that still leaves the second challenge: time. Let’s be honest, educators already have a lot on their plates: developing lesson plans, grading papers, attending faculty meetings, and that’s not to mention the actual time spent working with students. Many may feel they just don’t have the bandwidth to create a walkSTEM for their school, community center campus, or neighborhood.
This is where generative AI can help! This summer, talkSTEM has partnered with edutainment agency Hello SciCom to create the walkSTEM Generator, which takes advantage of this revolutionary technology to create a walkSTEM stops for any location in under five minutes, and for absolutely no cost – saving teachers precious time on their lesson plans. Our goal is to empower teachers to easily create walkSTEM or math walk stops – on campus or virtually – using their generative AI brainstorming partner in just minutes. These walks can align with your curriculum and connect to locations familiar to your students. Pose engaging questions, and let your students explore their surroundings through a new lens.
Not an AI expert? No problem! We’ve taken care of that for you with our simple three-step process.
- Upload this handy PDF into ClaudeAI, ChatGPT, or another Learning Language Model (LLM), and you will be prompted to answer a series of questions about your tour’s location, grade level, area of focus, theme, and number of stops. Educators can even add a personal story about the location or upload a photo if they want. They can even specify the local curricular standards to which the walkSTEM should adhere!
- In just seconds, the LLM will generate a custom walkSTEM Tour for your location, about your area of study, and on your desired theme. You may be amazed by how detailed and academically rigorous your tour is, and how deep and meaningful the questions are. Even still, we encourage educators to chat back and forth with the generative AI to revise their tour. Once satisfied, educators can then download and print a PDF of the tour and finally…
- Lead your students on their interactive walkSTEM experience.
There are, of course, many ways you can have generative AI help you get creative in developing your one walk stops. Hello SciCom’s Andrew and Willa experimented with a few free platforms and recorded some helpful tutorials designed to get you going very quickly.
We believe that when used correctly, AI can enhance students’ critical thinking skills and inspire curiosity, while making teaching faster, easier, more engaging, and more accessible for educators. You don’t need to take your students on a field trip to the museum, park, or zoo every week, though you might love to! walkSTEM AI Generator brings the wonder of exploring real-world places to you! And bringing an innovative technology into the classroom can invigorate students, and who knows, maybe even inspire them to create their own walkSTEM stops and tours.
The walkSTEM AI Generator is an innovative tool that can take STEM education into the future, and we want to use it to build a community of educators committed to connecting students’ places to math and STEM learning. We recently partnered with 12 teachers from the Dallas area, who are working with us to develop walkSTEM tours that they will bring to their students in the fall. We hope you will explore signing up for talkSTEM’s Educator Dashboard, and join our ever-expanding ecosystem.
In our next blog, we’ll check in with these teachers about their experience developing these tools, and walk through how you can do the same. Stay tuned!
