At Kids Science Labs, we offer afterschool and daytime STEM instruction that offers hundreds of schools the opportunity to boost their STEM classes for elementary kids with real experiments based on Amplify Science and NGSS. This week, our hands-on science enrichment classes on some of our campuses explored the basic forces and physics that kids love.

We asked “if you can blow a feather off a table, how strong would your breath need to be to blow a baseball sized rock off the table?”. Inquiry-based science programs must start with questions that first motivate kids to think, before we actually do a science experiment. It has to have context and be relevant to kids first, and then they will engage openly and with excitement.

We saw a class of kids trying to figure out how far they could throw a ball with just their hand/wrist, to better understand why taller volleyball players can generate so much force when they spike the ball. It’s physics and involves the length of a lever. We also saw some kids afterschool classes erupt with joy as they designed and built large catapults to launch volleyballs across the room! …….