Our Plan for The Toolkit
The Background
Our nonprofit Robotics & Beyond, located in New Milford, Connecticut, has evolved over 16 years into a tremendous model for introducing, inspiring, and encouraging young people into exciting futures in all fields of STEM as well as creative design through technology. When COVID-19 made physical meetings all but impossible, it became much harder for us to carry out our work. We couldn’t hold our usual Minecraft game nights, after-school or weekend classes, individual mentoring, adult education programs, or even open-house events.
We missed all of that interaction with our community. But it’s not impossible to continue a mission like ours when in-person contact is so restricted. It’s just an opportunity to apply our greatest strengths in new ways. Those strengths are our long and rich history and passion in STEM education; our knowledge of subject areas, careers, and education paths; and our ability to convey concepts and skills to all ages, ability levels, and learning styles.
We are finding that these strengths are even more important and relevant in this pandemic moment. More than ever, young people are anxious and driven to discover and develop their greatest talents on their own on the way to pursuing their futures. That discovery process will require much wider use of digital space and resources than in the past.
The community and connection that is so important to learning will be even more crucial in our new reality, over the next year of changing school routines. The massive amount of information and suggestions provided online that was daunting before COVID-19 is now expanding week by week. How can parents best guide their children or teachers guide their students?
Launching The Toolkit
In April of 2020 Robotics and Beyond had planned to launch a 20-year roadmap for refining our educational model and expanding our audience. That plan was based around building the regional capacity of our in-person programs and sharing our model with the world. Publishing more digital content was a part of that plan. COVID-19 caused us to analyze our strengths once again and apply them in new ways for a world in which online resources are far more necessary.
The Toolkit is the result of that process. Our new newsletter highlights useful and important STEM and design content online as well as distributes our original projects and the lessons that we’ve learned training so many students in technology. The goal is to help parents figure out best practices, access vetted information, and understand the biggest aspects of STEM education on their own.
The Toolkit will evolve in four phases:
A free, weekly newsletter that guides parents helping young people figure out the fields of STEM and technological design. On our website is a blog with additional best-of resources and expanded project instructions, based on Robotics & Beyond’s legacy.
We’ll launch voluntary subscriber-donations to fund the newsletter: Anyone can become a donor-subscriber at $5 / month or $50 / year to fund the work as well as expand into deeper original resources. Donor-subscribers will get access to our network of experts, student-mentors, and experienced educators.
When our newsletter is self-sustaining, we’ll develop affordable coaching on specific technical skills, career perspective and education paths. For example, how can you help your child discover coding, graphic design, or mechanical engineering, among many other topics? How can you help prepare a young adult for a career or for the education path necessary for the career they are most interested in? Imagine The Wirecutter but for STEM education.
The future is big: Original video series, podcasts, and instructional kits for parents under the Toolkit brand, which is always about clarity, simplicity, and transparency. Our nonprofit status will maintain our commitment to social good and serving our audience.
Along with The Toolkit, Robotics and Beyond will continue to develop and expand its in-person programming and use it as a test kitchen for new resources that can be provided online. Our plan is still to refine our local model and make it available for broad adoption. users will have even greater value while also knowing they are supporting RAB’s evolution into the future and long-term stability. — Paul Chayka 🧰