STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. And sometimes adding art turns STEM into STEAM. These disciplines give students opportunities to apply classroom learning to the real world, think critically, get creative, and solve problems through hands-on exploration.
National STEM Day is November 8, which makes it a great time to bring those skills together in your classroom. Whether you’re planning for the celebration or looking for STEM activities to use throughout the year, these ready-to-use Formative resources can help students design, build, test, analyze, and explore STEM careers.
Hands-on engineering challenges give students a reason to put STEM skills into action. In these activities, they’ll work through the engineering design process as they plan, build, test, collect evidence, and improve their designs.
Students can put the engineering design process into action with the Flight Lab: Paper Airplane Design Challenge. During this two-day STEM activity, they’ll design, test, and improve a paper airplane while collecting data from multiple trials.
Students can explore how gravity, force, and engineering design work together with the Egg Drop STEM activity. The challenge asks them to build a contraception that protects an egg when it’s dropped, giving them a concrete problem to solve through designing and testing.
This formative serves as a project companion for a STEM activity focused on building a contraption to protect an egg from breaking when dropped. Students will explore principles of gravity, force, design, and engineering through various formative tasks.
Bring the science of auto racing into your classroom with the STEM Pit Crew Challenge. Students rotate through Daytona 500-themed stations to investigate how STEM concepts affect what happens on the track and in the pits.
Teams record measurements and observations during the experimental portion of the activity, then use their results to answer conceptual and calculation questions about aerodynamics, banking, centripetal force, and lap-time data.
Give students a creative way to practice engineering with the Float STEM Challenge. Students research ideas, plan their approach, build their designs, and prepare to share their finished work and explain how or why it would work for a parade like Mardi Gras or Thanksgiving.
Challenge students to turn everyday recyclable materials into something functional with the Cardboard Toolbox Engineer activity. This 30-minute challenge gives students a chance to design and build a cardboard toolbox that can hold real, lightweight tools.
Bring robotics-inspired engineering into the classroom with the Recon Droid Prototype Engineering Challenge. Designed for high school students, this Star Wars-themed activity challenges teams to build a physical prototype using mostly recyclable or reused materials.
Formative becomes each group’s engineering design log. Students document plans, upload sketches and photos, record test results, and reflect on iterations. For an added challenge, teams can incorporate a moving part, simple machine, or basic robotics component when materials are available. Trying to stay screen-free? Print the activity to use offline instead!
Turn testing and redesign into a data-driven STEM challenge with the Indoor Launcher Engineering Lab. Students use everyday materials to design a launcher, then test how well it performs by measuring distance and accuracy.
Combine creative design with testing and iteration in the Sugar Skull Engineering Challenge. Student teams use a mold and their chosen method to build a skull, then put their design through the class strength test.
After recording the results, students improve their designs for a second iteration. They finish by explaining what they changed and how the data from testing supported that decision.
Technology-focused STEM activities give students opportunities to learn by building, testing, troubleshooting, and programming. These two activities let students investigate how circuits work and apply robotics concepts to a design challenge.
Help students investigate what makes an electrical circuit work with the STEM Lab: Circuits with Battery-Powered Lights activity. They’ll build simple circuits, compare different circuit arrangements, and troubleshoot problems.
By the end of the lab, students should be able to explain what makes a circuit work, identify common faults, and use evidence from their testing to justify a fix.
Give students a chance to apply robotics concepts with the Robot Design Challenge. They’ll work through designing, building, and programming a robot to complete a specific task.
Reflection questions throughout the activity ask students to think about each phase of the process, helping them connect the decisions they make while building and programming to their understanding of robotics concepts.
Not every National STEM Day activity has to involve building a physical prototype. Students can also explore how engineers approach problems and discover how science skills connect to careers they may have in the future.
These Formative lessons give students a chance to step back from the hands-on work and look at the processes and possibilities behind STEM.
Help students understand the thinking behind engineering challenges with a lesson on the engineering design process. They’ll explore what the steps are and consider when and why people use it to solve problems.
Pair this lesson with one of the hands-on challenges to give students a foundation for understanding the process they’re putting into practice.
Help students connect science learning to possibilities beyond the classroom with a science careers lesson. They’ll learn about careers across STEM disciplines and consider which ones might be a good fit for their interests. Use this activity for National STEM Day to show students that STEM doesn’t just stand for school subjects, but also for real-world work.
You don’t have to fit every STEM activity into November 8. Choose a challenge that connects to what your students are learning, or use National STEM Day as a starting point for more hands-on science, technology, engineering, and math experiences throughout the year.
You can also pair activities to build students’ understanding. Introduce the engineering design process before a hands-on challenge, or follow a design activity with the science careers lesson to help students connect the skills they practice to ways people use STEM beyond the classroom.
With Formative, you can assign these National STEM Day activities digitally or in print, collect students' responses and project evidence, and use what you learn to guide your next instructional steps. Sign up for Formative to start exploring these STEM activities with your students.
