Museum Hosts Steve Spangler’s Everyday STEM Workshop for Area Educators
HIGH POINT, NC – Classroom teachers from nearly every discipline are turning to their local museums for highly interactive, engaging professional development opportunities. As you’ll see in the photos below, the newly opened Nido and Marianna Qubein Children’s Museum in High Point, North Carolina, isn’t just a place for small children to wonder, discover and explore their world.
The museum hosted its first-ever hands-on STEM workshop for elementary and middle school teachers in an effort to provide local area educators with new opportunities in STEM education. Steve Spangler broke out many of his favorite hands-on activities to illustrate best practices and instructional strategies to increase student engagement in the classroom. High Point University faculty members from the School of Education were also on hand to provide key insights and to support the museum’s efforts to provide much needed professional development experiences for early childhood and elementary teachers.
An Amazing Night of Science Entertainment and Fun
It was great to see over 400 families and donors attend a special night at the Nido and Marianna Qubein Children’s Museum. I was honored to help kick-off the evening’s entertainment with a science show in the beautiful atrium, complete with flying toilet paper, a few great balls of fire, and rings of smoke that danced around the solar system.
The Nido & Mariana Qubein Children’s Museum added something that no other museum in the world has thanks to the generosity of the people at Excelligence Learning Corporation. It was my honor to unveil the museum’s newest exhibit – a life-size version of my Energy Stick science toy.
How does it work? The Energy Stick demonstrates the flow of electrons that travel safely across a person’s body to complete the circuit and trigger the stick to light up and make a sound. It’s a fun, simple toy used by parents and teachers to introduce young minds to the concept of simple circuits.
The Energy Stick exhibit was originally created by the people at Steve Spangler Science, a company I founded in 1993 and sold in 2018 to Excelligence Learning Corporation. After visiting the newly opened Qubein Children’s Museum last summer, I recommended to the new owners of Steve Spangler Science to make the museum the permanent home for their one-of-a-kind, life-size Energy Stick. I couldn’t be more excited about their decision.
My thanks to Nido and Marianna and the incredible museum leadership, including Megan Ward, Katie Nance and Barry Kitley for inviting me to be a part of this first-ever evening of STEM. If your travels take you anywhere close to High Point, North Carolina, make it a point to visit this fantastic museum filled with hours of wonder, discovery, and exploration.
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Learn more about Steve Spangler’s Everyday STEM workshop for K-8 teachers or STEM for Little Sprouts for early childhood educators.