Back Row: Teacher Kari Niland and SEED Board Member Matt Keane
Not Pictured: Classmate Evalee James
The Seacoast Educational Endowment for Dover (SEED), a non-profit organization that awards grants for projects to be implemented across Dover public schools has granted $950 to the Seacoast Charter School to purchase STEM engineer kits to be used in first and second grade classrooms.
This grant will provide 66+ students the opportunity to expand on classroom lessons by engaging in problem solving through simple sketches, drawings, or physical models to illustrate function as needed to solve engineering problems presented to them. “Students get excited about engineering. They get to come up with theories and test them and apply them to real-life situations,” said Kari Niland, grant winner and teacher at Seacoast Charter School. “It helps students see the world in new ways.” In addition to the kits, SEED sent Niland to a two-day workshop “Linking the E & M in STEM” presented by Engineering is Elementary at the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, where she learned strategies to integrate meaningful math and engineering activities to align with Common Core State Standards for math framework.