About 30 STEM Links
How much do you know about technology? Maybe you know enough to operate your phone or laptop. If you worry about online privacy, you might search online to learn how to protect yourself. This is how we all get information about technology.
However, finding technical information online is hit or miss. The amount of information available can outstrip our ability to easily identify accurate content.
30 STEM Links is two email newsletters a week with curated links. The links in each email provide useful content to help parents, teachers, librarians, and kids...
- Create new STEM curriculum
- Try out STEM projects with the kids in their lives
- Share and work together on puzzles and math problems
- Share interviews and profiles to inspire kids interested in STEM
- Find tools and resources to explore and use in the classroom
- Find non-coding content to engage kids interested in other areas of STEM
- Find game programming articles for kids to see if coding games interests them
- Find information about how to be safe online and be good digital citizens
- Learn how STEM teachers teach technical topics to their students
The 30 STEM Links email newsletter continues the spirit of an award-winning kids STEM magazine that I published for eleven years.
My goal also is to present technology from a diverse human perspective. There will be memes, for example. And Dad jokes. And links to odd stories about fungi that use chemical reactions to talk to each other. Also, rubber ducks. I also link to articles about how people use technology in different cultures. Beyond what we see on our TVs, movies, phones, and computers.
A monthly AMA (Ask Me Anything) and podcast will be included with the email newsletters. And I'm looking into creating a Discord community for events. That should start in June 2024.
In the meantime, I'd like to help you and others to understand technology a bit more. In a way that’s often interesting, fun, and engaging. With around 30 STEM/STEAM links a week in emails that arrive on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings. While content is delivered to adults, I'm hoping you'll share appropriate links with the kids in your life, to help them become digitally literate too.
While the Wednesday and Sunday emails are for paid subscribers only, free subscribers will get emails with some of the articles and its links from the prior week Wednesday email. Paid subscribers also get access to the 1200+ STEM/STEAM articles from my kids computing magazine website.
And most important to me, paid subscriptions will help me to provide Title 1 schools with free newsletter subscriptions plus free access to the 1200+ articles from the kids computing magazine website. This includes groups that support under-resourced kids. Together we can make a difference in the lives of kids in these schools and groups.
About Myself
I love to learn complex things and then figure out how to explain technical ideas and concepts to normal people. That's most people.
In 2013, I started to write and publish what evolved into beanz magazine, an award-winning kids computing magazine. It was a way for me to explore and write about odd things that I saw working as a technical writer in software development shops: rubber ducks on developer desks, dogfooding, pair programming, the Uncanny Valley, and Fizz Buzz.
Maybe 9 years into that adventure, working with a pack of writers, an editor, magazine designer, marketing person, and so on, it became clear to me that the magazine was about more than rubber ducks and dogfooding.
The magazine turned out to be about one simple question: what do we teach our kids about technology to help them learn how to understand and control technology? Also called digital literacy. And how do we ensure every kid in every culture and life situation has the same opportunities to become digitally literate? And how do we teach kids to use technology to bring together people from different cultures and points of view?
And, I would add from raising my kids, how to help teach kids about putting down the phone and stepping away from computers. These days, that's a critical life skill.
The magazine, and this email newsletter, are one way to help support a conversation and bring about change. It's a way to introduce kids and their adults to all the different aspects of technology. Most importantly, I'm hoping readers of my email newsletter will share some of what's in the emails with their kids and start a discussion. As well as have some fun learning together. It's also important to me that my email newsletter include what people are doing with technology in different cultures in different parts of the world.
I also have a long history of creating websites to curate hard to find technical content. If you search the Wayback Machine at Archive.org for AboutWebs.com circa 1999 and ReachCustomersOnline.com circa 2004, you'll find two sites I published for years before giving up those domains. You also can find me circa 1993 by searching Usenet at techwr-l.com/archives. I participated in The Well around that time too. I've been online for awhile.
If you're a serious type of person, I do have a LinkedIn profile. But I don't think of myself that way. I grew up in Northern California with six siblings. I believe most information should be free. And I'm happiest outdoors with family and friends. I also like to help people. None of that is terribly corporate or requires planning, measurement, and control.
— Tim Slavin