STEMports

Community-based STEM Learning and Workforce Development:

STEMports is an augmented reality game for community-based STEM learning and workforce development. STEMports engages youth and families in missions (ports) to enhance science, technology, engineering, and math learning, and to help them discover emerging STEM careers in their communities.

Rural communities have a great deal of STEM embedded in the community’s identity, but that identity often goes unnoticed or under-appreciated. STEMports will challenge the mentality that a STEM education and career are only available to upper income youth and adults in urban areas. The reality is that STEM identities of rural communities are truly embedded in the culture of the community. STEMports is aimed at honoring, amplifying, and redefining the STEM identities of rural communities so that the community’s youth and adults can see that a STEM workforce can emerge and grow locally.

To this end, STEMports developed the Station, an augmented-reality app (for iOS) that connects users to users with educational quests. By replacing pamphlets and signs with interactive place-based quest experiences you can get users learning outside all while telling an organization’s stories in a fun and unique new way. Great for engaging families, school groups, visitors and more! The Station allows parters to create “Quests,” or STEM-based learning experiences, tied to real-life environments within a community using location based augmented reality.