Blog - Inventionland Education

Inventionland Education is transforming schools across America by creating immersive Innovation Labs®, redefining what a classroom, STEM center, media center, or Career and Technical Education (CTE) space can be. These labs go beyond traditional learning environments, turning them into dynamic, hands-on spaces where students actively engage in problem-solving, creativity, and real-world innovation.

As developers of education tools, we pride ourselves in empowering students to think independently, work creatively, and learn collaboratively through our STEM curriculum. The course we’ve designed is extremely flexible, putting the power into the hands of students as they develop, build, and advertise their own original product.

If a student or colleague asked you what the difference between a 3D printer and a laser cutter was, what would you say? Is this the type of question you can answer confidently with your head held high, or the type that would have you faking an injury to avoid answering… our students aren’t the only ones who do this, right? As educators, it’s important that we continuously keep up with the latest technological innovations to ensure that we can give our students the proper tools and training to succeed in the real world. The problem is, when you’re outside of the Maker world, resources used to explain these technologies are often technical, daunting, and inaccessible to those in the field of education.

We all know the names of inspirational and influential women in our history. Women like Rosa Parks, Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Earhart, Maya Angelou- and many more whose actions and work have dramatically shaped the world we live in. There are, however, some women in STEM fields, both throughout our history and in our present, who haven’t quite become the household names they deserve to be.

As modern educators, we already know how important STEM/STEAM learning programs are for our students. What we may not know, however, is how many or which of our students who excel in these subjects actually wind up in a STEM/STEAM career. The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) released a federal report in 2017 that explored the participation of these groups in science and engineering fields. In the report, they stated that African American men made up 3% and African American women made up 2% of science and engineering jobs in 2015.

Teachers are always looking for new ways to inspire their students. We asked members of the Inventionland Institute team to give us their top three tweaks teachers can make in the classroom spark student creativity.

‘Tis the season for two-hour delays, school closings, end of semester exams, modified schedules, and everyone being sick. From January through March, there are a myriad of reasons you may not be able to teach a lesson exactly the way you planned it. Whether it’s because of shortened class times or smaller-than-normal class sizes, you need a plan of action for when your perfectly scheduled lesson just isn’t going to work out…but you also have to stay on schedule in order to cover all of your content.