COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
ABOUT
The word “community” can carry several meanings. It can denote a physical area, or a group of people who hold interests and goals in common. Vibrant community engagement addresses both of these ideas. We seek to engage first and foremost in the Fresno area and California’s Central Valley, while connecting to the STEAM education community across the state, country, and world. We also seek to expand participation in the broader STEAM community both geographically and demographically by fostering connections among diverse populations through the shared interest and goals of engaging in STEAM in their own contexts.
Maker Faires
Nurturing Creativity and Innovation in Your Community
We help bring Maker Faires to life by co-designing, planning, and implementing an event at a central location in your community. Our support includes collaborative planning meetings, providing engaging materials and activities, and co-facilitating alongside your staff to ensure a fun, creative, and impactful experience for all participants.
Stories & STEAM
Bridging the Gap Between STEAM and Literature
We partner with libraries to connect caregivers with simple, playful ways to extend children’s literature into hands-on learning. We share how to make STEAM connections to children’s literature by recreating a favorite story, solving problems characters face in books, exploring the world using your senses, and demonstrating how to use common household items for experiments.
Family Events
STEAM for Parents and Caregivers
We design and host interactive STEAM events that engage children and parents in hands-on learning experiences, helping caregivers support their child’s development and interest. Partnering with local organizations, we bring these exhibits on site to create meaningful opportunities for families to explore, play, and learn together.
Playshops
Learn through Making
Our Playshops are dedicated to playful learning with creative materials. Using a maker-centered learning framework, we explore tinkering, collaboration, and design with a variety of tools and technologies. Each Playshop invites participants to share their own ideas, artifacts, stories, and experiences. We use these collaborative experiences to explore how to design learning-through-making experiences that are interest-driven and equitable for young people.
