Teaching Kids Science and Technology outside the Classroom

How to make science and technology resources fun and exciting and easily accessible for school aged children?

Genesis Energy is New Zealand’s largest electricity and gas retailer. One of their key impact activities is promoting science and technology education to school aged children. During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 access to school children through their normal channels.

They looked for new options to engage and teach school aged children online and discovered The Mind Lab had already established MindLabKids as a learning management system for children to learn and discover online. Through the Genesis partnership, the MindLabKids website was further enhanced through new content  specifically focused on energy. This resource was made available directly to students to use in their homes, and teachers as a lead on a class project group.

While this project concluded at the end of the lockdowns, the MindLabKids content lives on through a dedicated free channel on YouTube

academyEX developed a comprehensive online experience for students aged 5 - 12 years to promote home-based learning opportunities focused on sceince and technology. The activities that were promoted were presented in highly engaging videos fronted by a range of fun characters including - Viking Rich, Mal-Dizzie, Professor D and Coco.

Genesis Energy supported the learning platform but they were keen to expand the reach to include teachers who could establish class registration for class based learning. academyEX leveraged the existing LMS and development a teacher only sign up process to streamline the onboarding process and to develop a class community around the learning. 

To protect the community from inappropriate comments and uploads, parents or caregivers were required to sign up and approve learning accounts, and all content uploaded by students was pre-checked and approved prior to going live on the site.

Many thousands of school aged students signed up for the free Mind Lab Kids platform over the duration of the project. Students were encouraged to recreate the experiments and concepts that were shared by videos, and also develop their own unique interpretations of the videos. Students then uploaded their own videos to the platform showing what the created and how they approached their learning. An entire community of learners from around the world added videos and commentary about their creative outputs.