INSPIRING THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS.
Science Buddies™ a diverse audience of more than 18 million K-12 teachers and students each year from all walks of life through its online platform. This platform helps students build literacy in science and technology through free learning tools. This includes lesson plans, independent experiments and engagement with an online community of science professionals who advise and inspire students to pursue further education in science and technology.
As part of an ongoing commitment to furthering STEM education in 2016, Astellas USA Foundation continued to expand its existing partnership with Science Buddies to inspire the next generation of scientists by helping to close the critical gap in STEM outreach to rural communities. Astellas USA Foundation funded a Science Buddies outreach campaign in rural communities, aimed to increased awareness among local educators about Science Buddies' free resources by curating and publicizing project activities specifically targeted for rural communities, including the "From Turbid to Clear: How Flocculation Cleans Up Drinking Water" project. The outreach campaign resulted in more than 25,000 students and teachers in rural Illinois communities using Science Buddies learning tools during the 2016-17 school year.
In 2017, Astellas USA Foundation funded the creation of Science Buddies’ Cosmetic Chemistry Science Projects collection. This collection, aimed at helping students discover the importance of chemistry in their every-day lives, features eight hands-on science and engineering projects for K-12 students with a focus on creativity. One project, “Make Your Own Shampoo and Test How It Performs!” allows students to create their own shampoo recipes and compare the effectiveness of the DIY versions to store-bought shampoo. The Cosmetic Chemistry collection of projects have been accessed by over 172,000 Science Buddies users in the last year alone.
Additionally, in the 2016-17 school year, support from contributors allowed Science Buddies to:
- Pilot the Science Buddies Kit Club and provided 600 free science kits to K-12 classrooms in 16 schools in underserved areas.
- Enable teachers to "go-paperless" by integrating Science Buddies resources with Google Classroom, an online learning management tool.
- Start creating a library of Next Generation Science Standards-aligned Lesson Plans, designed to make teaching science easy for teachers and fun and engaging for students.
- Open the annual Fluor Engineering Challenge to more than 3,000 K-12 students from 11 countries.
By the 2016-17 school year, 82% of the teachers responding to Science Buddies annual educator survey reported strong correlations between independent, hands-on student science projects and a greater interest in science.
In prior years, Astellas USA Foundation provided a grant to help support eight Science Buddies’ science career profile pages and the creation of three new career profiles featuring Astellas employees on the Science Buddies website. These profiles helped students see real scientists and learn how classroom learnings can lead to long-term careers.
Astellas USA Foundation also provided a grant to Science Buddies to support its plant biology interest area, providing more than 400,000 students access to exciting, free science resources each year. The grant supported the creation of two new project ideas in the botany interest area.
Thanks to the ongoing support from Astellas USA Foundation, students can see how STEM comes to life right around them.
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