The STEM-tastic Adventures app is intended to help young children practice and learn CT skills in the context of the STEM connections we identified. The app, along with the related hands-on activities, was co-designed with preschool educators and families, media and curriculum developers, and researchers, and found to help children learn important computational thinking and STEM concepts. You can download STEM-tastic Adventures for free on the App Store and Google Play platform.
City Walk invites children to create a sequence of navigation instructions (algorithms) for their robot friend to deliver gifts around town. The app scaffolds this process by progressively introducing more complex tasks and helping children learn how to identify errors (debugging) via visuals and audio feedback. City Walk promotes visual spatial thinking and introduces visual spatial vocabulary such as forward, backward, left and right in an engaging way.
Better Building invites children to closely observe and sort objects by color, shape and size (math and science), and label groups to help the robot friend more efficiently build structures. In doing so children practice hiding unnecessary details and highlighting important information (abstraction).
Preschool Computational Thinking