Lights, Camera, ACTION

Utah’s STEM Action Program

We love hearing about all the different ways and places Brackitz are being used around the country! From playrooms to classrooms to children’s museums and more, adults are sharing the unique benefits of Brackitz engineering sets with girls and boys everywhere.

Recently, we partnered with STEM Action Center Utah, a division of the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development, which works to develop Utah’s workforce of the future. The program drives research and implementation of STEM education best practices across Utah by coordinating STEM-related activities, creating and supporting STEM education, facilitating educator access to education tools, and aligning public STEM education with higher-education STEM activities.

The Action Center will be using Brackitz building sets to provide hands-on support for STEM lessons like teaching the engineering design process. For example, students were recently challenged to build a tower, using Brackitz, that was taller and more structurally sound than the ones their peers created. Following the engineering design process, they:

• Defined the problem (building a tall, structurally sound tower)
• Did some research (what practices could they employ to ensure stability?)
• Specified the requirements of the project (what are the rules?)
• Brainstormed solutions (what are a few ways we could go about this?)
• Picked the best solution (of those ways, which is the best?)
• Considered development (okay, how do we go about building that way?)
• Built a prototype (let’s try it!)
• Tested (give it a nudge – does it tip over?)
• Redesigned (if it tips, what can we do to make it more stable?)

As you can see, they went big! Following the process outlined above, they created some seriously spectacular (and stable) towers. The hands-on work ensures that the process sticks – plus, Brackitz make everything more fun.      

Brackitz engineering toys are the only construction toys that let kids design any structure they can imagine - anything.  Our unique, connect-anywhere Brackitz enables kids to create large scale, portable, 3-D structures – with no instructions or limitations – all while learning real-life math, science, engineering, and architecture skills.  

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