In The STEM Club Goes Exploring, students explore science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. While interviewing STEM professionals, the students prepare to make career presentations during their school’s Favorites Day.
Join STEM Club members Fran, Sara, Nixie, Winston, Patti, Betik, Jenny, Jesse, and their teacher Mr. Day, as they make field trips to a video game company, a veterinary clinic, a hospital, and even a mine, to learn more about career opportunities for professionals in STEM fields.
Author Lois Melbourne, of the My Future Story series, inspires readers to identify their passions, explore them, and shape their own future stories. – Goodreads
The STEM Club Goes Exploring Review
The STEM Club Goes Exploring has an admirable aim that it almost accomplishes perfectly. Aimed at kids ages 9-12, it explains and briefly explores some of the careers students in (S)cience, (T)echnology, (E)ngineering and (M)ath have open to them. Confession Time: I didn’t realize a good quarter of the ones discussed fell under the STEM umbrella. Pretty cool! Lois Melbourne does a fantastic job of making clear the sheer variety of jobs available. The section on what goes in to making an app was extremely interesting. It perfectly illustrated that not only does it take a team to pull off something, but that all parts are equally important.
The illustrations are nice, and reminded me strongly of The Magic School Bus. There’s definitely a nice diversity of characters, and it doesn’t feel like one gets more ‘air-time’ than the other. In fact, the author goes out of her way to throw some stereotypes on their head. For example, having one of the girls proclaiming her love of math and how she thinks about it all the time. However, though the illustrations are nice, the positioning and size of the text could use some work. The small, dense blocks of text are very easy for the eye to skim over instead of really reading. It’s not a friendly format for small screens if you’re considering pulling this up on a tablet/phone for the kids to read. Even pulled up on a large computer screen, it still isn’t optimal, as the text is really tiny.
Overall, The STEM Club Goes Exploring is a nice book packed with lots of interesting information. It just, funnily enough, has a few design flaws that keep it from being perfect. It would be a great book to have in a classroom library, waiting rooms, and places like that. It is great at opening up the mind to the possibilities they have in front of them for those who prefer STEM subjects. Get it now on Amazon.
Title: The STEM Club Goes Exploring | Series: My Future Story | Author: Lois Melbourne (site) | Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group (site) | Pub. Date:2016-6-15 | ISBN13: 9781626343030 | Genre: Educational | Language: English | Triggers: None | Rating: 4 out of 5 | Date Read: 2016-8-13 | Source: Received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
