8 Reasons Stem Challenges are Beneficial

1. New Challenges
   Each engineering challenge gives students something new to solve and more than likely, it is a challenge they have never tried before.

2. Critical Thinking Skills
   Students aren’t just scanning a passage for an answer or solving math problems with a step-by-step process. They are actually coming up with a brand new solution. They can’t just copy an answer or guess. They have to manipulate the materials and THINK!

3. Hands on
   With STEM engineering projects, students are DOING science, not just reading about it or answering questions about it.

4. Lots of Right Answers
   This is especially great for your struggling students who sometimes struggle to get the one right answer. This is also great for your perfectionist students who feel most comfortable with only one right answer. It gives them practice being uncomfortable and looking for other possibilities.

5. Builds Background Knowledge
   STEM activities give your students background knowledge that you can refer back to later on. For instance, if students are creating a newspaper tower, they will naturally learn that they have to balance and distribute the weight. Later on, when you are reading the textbook chapter, you can say, “Hey, remember when we built the newspaper tower…” and you can build on their knowledge.

6. Safe Failure
   STEM engineering challenges give students a safe place to experience failure and to learn from attempts that don’t work. When their first prototype doesn’t work, they just create a new one, and they learn that it is ok to mess up.

7. Teamwork
   Students learn to compromise, share tasks, and work together in order to meet the challenge with the designated time and material constraints. They quickly learn that if they do not work together, they will not finish their challenge in time. Having a completed project is a great motivation!

8. Bang for your Buck                                                                                                                                                            I don’t mean money, but time. Science time is precious and scarce. STEM engineering challenges can practice a whole lot of essential skills (measurement, creating a hypothesis, conducting an experiment, using science tools, thinking like a scientist, and more) in a short amount of time.

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Candler, L. (n.d.). STEM Engineering: Will building a tower with newspaper REALLY benefit my students? Retrieved                       September 18, 2018, from https://www.lauracandler.com/stem-engineering-project/