Lessons to be learned with daily STEM videos

Its doors may be shut, but Great Lakes Science Center reaching out with daily STEM videos

Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic has closed the Great Lakes Science Center to visitors. However, the downtown Cleveland educational venue is still living up to its mission to make science, technology, engineering and math — aka STEM — come alive. Through its YouTube channel (bit.ly/glsc-ytc), GLSC is supporting educators and families with a free online engagement called “Curiosity Corner Live.”

“When we started seeing the writing on the wall about shutting our doors, we thought about how we can best serve our audience — parents with kids ages 2 to 12,” GLSC STEM Education VP Scott Vollmer said. “We felt it was time to walk our talk.

“We’re more than a place to just take your family. We like to provide Northeast Ohio’s youth the tools to succeed in this complex and obviously changing world. So it’s our mission to reach out to these families and provide them with STEM learning opportunities and informal science opportunities.”

The result is the “Curiosity Corner Live,” which twice daily weekdays — 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. — can be found on YouTube. The new web-based series of STEM curriculum and programming builds off the GLSC’s “Curiosity Corner” blog featuring virtual fun learning experiences.

Every day, new content includes not only experiments that can be completed at home but also exclusive content filmed at the GLSC, as well as quizzes and games.

“Curiosity Corner Live” kicked off with STEM Learning Programs Development Director Robyn Kaltenbach leading viewers through a boat float, which involved building an aluminum foil boat and seeing how many pennies it could hold before sinking.

“By the 3 p.m. session, we had a bunch of uploads people did in their own home of this boat-float activity,” Vollmer said. “There were tons of people on there, parents working with their kids on doing this activity. It really provides an outlet for parents who are at home with their children.

“Also, each afternoon, after going over what we did in the morning, we’ll also give a tease of what experiments people can prepare for the next day.”

Viewers can ask questions live via comments on the GLSC’s YouTube channel or across all of the venue’s social media platforms.

Moving forward, “Curiosity Corner Live” will continue to feature a handful of team members leading viewers through experiments, big science shows and weeklong citizen science activities. The latter is tied to a larger group of people inputting data.

“NASA has citizen science activities around stars in the sky or light pollution,” Vollmer said. “Collectively, as it grows over the week and many people do it, you’ll start to see some bigger data numbers making an impact and start talking solutions to different problems.

“We’re reaching deep into our curriculum that we constantly create for our summer camps, workshops at the Science Center and workshops with emerging technology. ‘Curiosity Corner Live’ is a nice place to take those, redesign them and put them live on the internet so people can feel they’re getting what the science center has to offer.”

SUBMITTED An experiments is done during a Winter Wonder Days at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, which has been closed due to the threat of the coronavirus.

SUBMITTED While Great Lakes Science Center personnel normally like to work young people in person, for now they’re settling for educational videos through the GLSC YouTube channel.