The beginnings of STEM

When we started on STEM, the first thing that we did was brainstorm potential solutions to the big, abstract problem that is "STEM." Some ideas that we had were
-getting kids involved in tangible engineering projects
-making fun engineering games
-make everyday engineering appealing to kids (like the captive audiences stuff that we got started on)
-excite parents about engineering topics
-improve STEM education in schools
-excite kids about STEM in schools
-incorporate STEM education into everyday life
-incorporate STEM into captive environments
-excite parents about their kids' STEM education
-help kids believe that they can be engineers
-teach kids STEM basics
-get STEM into cheap labs
-increase STEM hobbyists
-increase model airplanes
-increase shop class
-increase working with hands
-get kids to learn from and teach parents
-get kids pumped about STEM

We brainstormed some people to talk to for interviews (mostly our peers) and some experts in the space:
-Paulo Bilkstein
-Paul Kim
-Sal Khan
-Mehran Sahami
-Gates Foundation
-DoE
-Google.org
-Nueva school
-Carnegie Corporation
-IDEO (they did a project on STEM with Gates and Carnegie)

We also re-did our stakeholder analysis with STEM in mind:
-students
-parents
-principals
-WISE / SWE / WICS
-science teachers
-current engineers
-kids who like STEM
-kids who hate STEM
-educators in other countries that are better at STEM than the US
-ESL kids
-teachers

After that, our big question was who to target. We wondered what age kids got set on STEM or not. We also wondered about parents and their backgrounds. We wondered about memorable experiences and how interests evolved over time. We resolved to interview 5 of our friends with engineering backgrounds and 2 from non-engineering backgrounds.

We also set a timeline for the remainder of the quarter:

-the first week (ending on 4/22), we'll narrow the scope in terms of age and subject, we'll do background research, and we'll interview classmates. Since we did this on 4/20, this wasn't too much for us to do moving forward.
-The second week, we'll decide our groups, get insight, make point of view statements, synthesize down to one point of view, do more interviews, and observe users
-the third week, we need to present our points of view. Between the third and fourth weeks, we need to brainstorm "how might we" statements, come up with potential solutions, prototype them, get feedback, and start over again
-the fifth week has presentations on prototypes. between the fifth and sixth weeks, we need to synthesize everything and continue to iterate on our best prototypes.
-on May 25, we will present our final iteration.

Our whiteboards: