News

Iowa youth gain awareness and excitement for STEM through STEM Day at the Iowa State Fair, among other events and programs led by the STEM Council each year.

Letter from Executive Director

Dear Iowa STEM Community,

Educator tries virtual reality in Iowa STEM Teacher Externship

Externship helps STEM teacher tie real-world concepts to ‘virtual’ careers

Design Mill, Inc. in Dubuque provides an emergent line of work, creating virtual reality experiences of warehouses for industrial clients to use in real estate or for employee training purposes. Like most STEM careers in Iowa, new ones like this crop up almost every day.

Top programs to STEM-spire at least 86,000 young Iowans come fall

April always comes with a fresh start—budding leaves, blooming flowers and for Iowa STEM, a new garden of programs ready to grow across Iowa for youth through the Iowa STEM Scale-Up Program.

Teacher Leaders huddle over STEM

Now that teacher leaders and instructional coaches dwell in schools throughout the state, an ideal partnership is in the making between Iowa STEM and building-level lead instructors. A robust roster of 440 such pivot-point educators in the areas of mathematics and science, as well as in the applied fields of technology and engineering, were accrued with the help of superintendents across Iowa.

Bringing STEM to the Capitol

Executive branch leaders and state legislators took more than a moment on February 16 to pause from the weighty matters upstairs in the Senate and House chambers to celebrate something they created and continue to generously support—Iowa’s statewide STEM program.

Local workplaces seeking STEM teacher expertise

If you are a teacher, you have probably wondered how your mathematics or science topics are used behind the walls of the manufacturing plant across town, or what kinds of roof-beam geometry and cement wall chemistry the construction crew uses to build that bridge up north or those new lofts downtown.

Calling all Iowa workplaces: Host a summer Iowa STEM Teacher Extern

Connecting schools and businesses is one of the main goals of the STEM Council. Whether that business is a global manufacturer or a rural service supplier, the Iowa STEM Teacher Externships program unites the producers of talent (schools) with the employers of talent (business and industry) for mutual benefit.

Iowa STEM Teacher Externs to bring workplace to classroom this fall

“This test consists of cycling a damaged window through a series of positive and negative pressures that replicate the conditions of a hurricane moving in and out of the area,” said Eric Grabe, physics and computer teacher at Newton Senior High School, working this summer at Pella Corporation in Pella.