Nintendo gets into STEM education
Company partners with Canadian charity to make learning more fun
Nintendo is a company that is singularly focused on fun and games, which is why its just announced partnership with Actua, a charitable organization that offers science, engineering and tech education to youth, is something different for the house that Mario built.
The company is donating over 2,000 Labo kits to help Actua get kids excited about the STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and math.
Nintendo launched Labo kits earlier this year, in which cardboard models are used to create things like vehicles, musical instruments, a fishing rod and even a life-size robotic suit that kids can wear. Each kit also has a Garage mode, which children can use to tinker and create, a way to hopefully make learning more fun.
“We would love to see more and more kids interested in math, and science, engineering and coding. We believe that pipeline is critically important for Nintendo’s future and, really, for our overall future, “said Nintendo COO Reggie Fils-Aimé in an interview explaining the partnership. “These are now fundamental skills that are becoming more and more challenging for people to get exposure to and, also, to do it in a way that they find fun.”
Nintendo chose Actua for a number of reasons, including the fact that it runs in-school and after-school programs across Canada, and one of its main pillars is a focus on helping under-served and under-represented students, including girls, Indigenous youth, and youth in rural, remote and lower socio-economic areas.
“We really try to get into those spaces and hopefully will get these in front of kids that might not have a chance to learn with this technology, “says Actua president Jennifer Flanagan.
“The reason we were really interested in this partnership with Nintendo is that we’ve been working a lot on digital literacy, in the space of trying to move youth from being really passive consumers of technology to active producers of technology. We know they are great at using it, but we want them to be active users who are learning with it.”
Nintendo is also venturing into schools in the U.S., running a pilot project in New York with the Institute of Play to introduce Labo kits into elementary classrooms.
The program will eventually expand to about 100 schools across the U.S., the website engadget.com reports.
It’s an interesting move for a company that has been knocked for the learning potential of its products.
The Switch is a great gaming console and Labo kits are an interesting melding of tactile cardboard and technology, but they are not cheap, especially compared with competitors, and the Switch has been criticized for its lack of apps, especially compared to more multiuse devices like the iPad.
Flanagan counters, saying that Actua uses a lot of different technologies and Labo has some great benefits.
“We love the cardboard aspect, it’s very tactile and physical, but we love that there’s an extension aspect to it, she says.
Flanagan says Actua’s members already have a number of ideas to build learning modules around the Labo kits. One example is to create a learning game around the fishing rod kit that teaches about local marine wildlife.