The Trump administration is reshaping the pursuit of science through federal cuts to and the . This will have real consequences for students interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM learning.

One of those consequences is the elimination of such as robotics camps and access to advanced math courses for K-12 students.

As a result, families and caregivers are more essential than ever in supporting children’s learning.

Based on , I offer four ways to support children’s summer learning in ways that feel playful and engaging but still foster their .

1. Find a problem

Look for “problems” in or around your home to engineer a solution for. could include brainstorming ideas, drawing a sketch, creating a prototype or a first draft, testing and improving the prototype and communicating about the invention.

For example, one family in created an upside-down soap dispenser for the following problem: “the way it’s designed” − specifically, the straw − “it doesn’t even reach the bottom of the container. So there’s a lot of soap sitting at the bottom.”

To identify a problem and engage in the engineering design process, families are encouraged to use common materials. The materials may include cardboard boxes, cotton balls, construction paper, pine cones and rocks.

Our research found that when children engage in engineering in the home environment with caregivers, parents and siblings, they communicate about and apply that are often “hidden” in their actions.

For instance, when building a paper roller coaster for a marble, children think about how the height will affect the speed of the marble. In math, this relates to the relationship between two variables, or the idea that one thing, such as height, impacts another, the speed. In science, they are of kinetic energy and potential energy. The higher the starting point, the more potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, which makes the marble move faster.

In addition, children are learning what it means to be an engineer through their . Families and caregivers play a role in supporting their and willingness to work through .

2. Spark curiosity

Open up a space for exploration around STEM concepts driven by their interests.

Currently, my research with STEM professionals who were homeschooled talk about the power of learning sparked by curiosity.

One participant stated, “At one time, I got really into ladybugs, well Asian Beatles I guess. It was when we had like hundreds in our house. I was like, what is happening? So, I wanted to figure out like why they were there, and then the difference between ladybugs and Asian beetles because people kept saying, these aren’t actually ladybugs.”

Researchers label this , or even . The moments lead to deep engagement and learning of STEM concepts. This may also be a chance to learn things with your child.

3. Facilitate thinking

In , being uncertain about STEM concepts may lead to children exploring and considering different ideas. One concept in particular − playful uncertainties − is when parents and caregivers know the answer to a child’s uncertainties but act as if they do not know.

For example, suppose your child asks, “How can we measure the distance between St. Louis, Missouri, and Nashville, Tennessee, on this map?” You might respond, “I don’t know. What do you think?” This gives children the chance to share their ideas before a parent or caregiver guides them toward a response.

4. Bring STEM to life

Turn ordinary moments into curious conversations.

“This recipe is for four people, but we have 11 people coming to dinner. What should we do?”

In a recent interview, one participant described how much they learned from listening in on financial conversations, seeing how decisions got made about money, and watching how bills were handled. They were developing financial literacy and math skills.

As they noted, “By the time I got to high school, I had a very good basis on what I’m doing and how to do it and function as a person in society.”

Globally, individuals , which can lead to negative outcomes in the future when it comes to topics such as retirement planning and debt.

Why is this important?

Research shows that talking with friends and family supports how children see themselves as learners and their later success in STEM fields, even if they do not pursue a career in STEM.

also shows how family STEM participation gives children opportunities to explore STEM ideas in ways that go beyond what they typically experience in school.

In my view, these kinds of STEM experiences don’t compete with what children learn in school − they strengthen and support it.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

In just a few weeks, these Olympians will be back to learning English and math with a proud story to tell.

Rivera, the youngest athlete on Team USA, a gold medal for the women’s gymnastics team finals, alongside decorated gymnasts Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles and Suni Lee.

“This was such an amazing experience and just being with the team to support them meant the world to me,” Rivera after receiving her gold medal in Paris. “It was so surreal.”

The 16-year-old New Jersey native did not compete as part of gymnastics team’s final competition, however. Rivera failed to qualify for the final based on her performance in two individual events — the bars and beam. Her overall score still helped the U.S. women’s gymnastics team advance and clinch the gold.

absolutely loving the commentators talking about how important hezly rivera is to this team and how just because she isn’t competing, doesn’t mean she contributed any less to wherever they stand at the end of the night

— aman (@royaltothebay)

Rivera attends Inspire Academy, an online school that allows her the flexibility to balance a rigorous training schedule.

Like Rivera, Wilson in the first leg of the U.S. men’s 4×400-meter relay, helping the team to qualify for the final and making him the youngest male track and field athlete from the United States to win a gold medal at the Olympics.

Although Wilson, who is a rising junior at Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland, admitted he “didn’t run his best,” he praised his teammates including Rai Jefferson, Christopher Bailey and Vernon Norwood, who helped support him during the run for gold. And he returned the favor as he them on from the stands of the Stade de France as they secured an Olympic-record victory. 

“I did what people said was the impossible…” Wilson on Instagram. “I’m the youngest US male track athlete to receive a gold medal at the Olympics!” 

The track and field sensation attention on social media when he his thoughts about the upcoming school year following his performance in Paris. He took to X and said, “Dang, I really got school in 2 and a half weeks #Gold #OlympicGamesParis.”

Dang, I really got school in 2 and a half weeks

— Quincy “Q” Wilson (@QuincyWilson5)

Jokes in reply immediately came flying in from fans after Wilson made this post.

“When the teacher asks for answers, raise your medal instead of your hand,” one fan said.  

“Them ‘what did yall do over summer break’ conversations gonna hit different lmao,” another added.

Like her high school Team USA counterparts, Shackell’s preliminary round participation helped earn her and her teammates Olympic medals. She a silver medal in the 4×200 freestyle relay with teammates including Katie Ledecky, Paige Madden and fellow high schooler Claire Weinstein. She also secured gold in the 4×100 medley relay with Regan Smith, Lilly King and Gretchen Walsh.

The 17-year-old, who will begin her senior year at Carmel High School this week, has made history as Carmel’s first female student to win an Olympic medal in swimming.

Many know her as an Olympian. We know her as a student. Welcome back to our Senior Greyhound ! We are so proud of you. Go Hounds!

— Tim Phares (@Tim4Phares)

“I was just happy to be there and happy to go as fast as I can, and get the girls the next night a good spot,” Shackell . “I’ve been wanting a gold medal or like any medal since I was little, like 8 years old and dreaming of that moment. To be able to hold it is crazy, I’ve been looking at it everyday.”

Shackell is also the second female high school student from Indiana to win an Olympic medal in swimming.

For Rivera, Wilson and Shackell, many fans anticipate their return to the Olympics podium in 2028, when the U.S. will host the Summer Games in Los Angeles, California. They’ve just got to finish their homework first. 

Learn more about the other high school students we rooted for on Team USA this summer here. 

I about the strange schism between early child care and school-aged child care, and I don’t want to belabor the point other than to say parents of school-aged children represent a shockingly untapped care constituency. Instead, I want to talk about summer care, and summer camp specifically. I recently had the chance to do a podcast recording with the American Camp Association (ACA), alongside the outstanding economist Kathryn Anne Edwards. I also don’t want to get out ahead of the podcast, so I’ll just say one part of the conversation that stood out to me was thinking about summer care needs as a door to movement-building. [UPDATE 6/7/24: The podcast is now live and available .]

After all, one of the major mindset barriers that holds back child care policy is the idea that child care needs are entirely individual family obligations, and thus the state has little-to-no role. I frequently quote a : “the conceptual shift away from thinking about one’s situation as an individual problem or as a problem caused by fate or nature, to thinking about it as a social or public problem, is widely understood to be a necessary, if insufficient, condition for political action.”

Summer care seems to offer many of the factors necessary for that conceptual shift. For one, it’s easy to see the absurdity of providing free public schools (and its child care) for seven hours a day, nine months out of the year, and then suddenly leaving a multi-month gap. While the discussion over how we got here is interesting, and has , the fact is summer’s a for millions and millions of families. This is also a distinctly American headache: journalist Katherine Goldstein recently in which she reported:

I was not able to find any other Western country that has the combination of long summer breaks, no mandated paid vacation time, minimal subsidized options and a dominant cultural belief that kids need constant supervision, especially in public places. Clearly articulating all of these factors really helps me understand how we find ourselves in Hunger Games-like registration battles and spending thousands per kid per summer, just so parents can continue their jobs (emphasis hers).

Moreover, summer camp has the advantage of nostalgia. Early child care is still fighting for its reputation, and there are plenty of Americans—as many as half, —who think young children have little business being cared for outside the home. Not so with summer camps. According to the ACA, more than 26 million kids attend a form of summer camp every year. that they look back on fondly decades after the fact; I know I do. It is what marketers might call an ‘easy sell.’

Finally, it’s worth noting that the falls heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class families. Lower-income families are from camp participation altogether due to things like cost, transportation and not being available to sit at a computer at 8 a.m. repeatedly hitting refresh as if trying to acquire a Taylor Swift concert ticket. Thus, there is a major opportunity for cross-class solidarity in improving summer care options. (Reducing the length of summer break is unlikely to be a viable lever: despite the summer scramble, year-round school by parents.)

It is not uncommon for less popular policy ideas to ride along with more popular ones. To use the example of a different ACA, the Affordable Care Act’s restriction on insurance companies discriminating due to preexisting conditions was one of the keys to its passage in the face of opposition. Child care has its own history here: as Sally Cohen details in on federal child care policymaking, the Child Care and Development Block Grant passed in 1990 largely as a “sidekick” to the more-popular Earned Income Tax Credit. Yet as far as I’m aware, there is currently no major national proposal around summer child care.

I don’t want to overstate the case. Creating a comprehensive birth-to-13 child care system is going to be expensive and complex, and no one is going to be hoodwinked by including a robust mechanism for increasing the supply and affordability of summer camps. We still need to argue for early care and education on its own merits, and we should not pretend that early care needs and school-aged needs are identical. I wonder, though, if summer care shouldn’t be closer to the tip of the spear, rather than a forgotten cousin.

This July, the site coordinator with America Scores Los Angeles was back at Palms Elementary School, helping to lead one-on-one matches on the blacktop and reminding participants to keep their heads up as they chase the ball.

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He knows the value of the program, which combines the world’s most popular sport with literacy and cultural activities for children whose families can’t afford to play in a competitive league. He used to be one of those students.

“Some of the coaches I had were huge role models,” said Aquino, 28, now earning a degree in child psychology while working as a shift supervisor for In-N-Out, California’s iconic burger chain.

The program has many of the elements that experts look for in a high-quality summer experience — a blend of enrichment and academic support, a focus on relationships and a dedicated staff. Aquino isn’t America Scores L.A.’s only long-time staff member. A Palms Elementary special education assistant has been leading the academic side of the program for almost 20 years. That stability was especially important this year after months of missed in-person learning, said Brodrick Clarke, vice president of programs for the National Summer Learning Association.

“Programs that have long-standing relationships with families and are embedded in communities are thriving,” he said.

But in a year when parents and educators are looking to summer school to fill some of the gaps students have experienced because of the pandemic, some districts have struggled to find enough teachers to meet the demand. Districts are doing their best to hit moving targets around COVID safety, parent demand and the Delta variant, Clarke said. But even with dedicated federal funding for summer learning, newer programs have a “growth curve,” he said.

A July 29 from the Afterschool Alliance showed that more than half of programs have waitlists this summer, and 57 percent of the responding providers said they had concerns about their ability to hire enough staff members.

‘A pivotal year’

That means some students have been shut out of learning recovery efforts this summer.

Bryan Walsh, whose son Leo will be a third grader this fall in the Arlington Public Schools in Virginia, is among the parents who counted on their children participating in a summer program only to have it cancelled due to a lack of teachers.

In April, Walsh received notice that his son, who receives special education services, was automatically eligible for summer school. So he unenrolled Leo from camps offered by the local parks and recreation department, where he had already paid deposits.

But in mid-May, another email from the district stated that Leo’s program, which targeted students with special needs, had been cancelled. District spokesman Andrew Robinson said the district offered incentives— $1,000 for teachers and $500 for assistants — but still wasn’t able to recruit enough teachers.In the meantime, other camps had filled up and Walsh scrambled to find open slots. (He found space in cooking and musical theater camps, but said, “these aren’t academically oriented.”)

After a year in which Leo never had more than two shortened days of in-person learning a week, Walsh said he can’t imagine his son hasn’t fallen behind. But for a child who “couldn’t get out of the car fast enough” when schools reopened in March, he said was more concerned about him missing the “social-emotional interactions that are part and parcel of an 8-year-old’s existence in such a pivotal year.”

Robinson said 850 teachers and staff are still serving more than 4,600 students this summer and that the district will make “necessary and informed decisions as next summer approaches to further strengthen our program.”

‘Take out the friction’

Aaron Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, understands why districts have experienced challenges.

“Teachers are so exhausted, and they deserve to be,” he said. Districts have faced the opposite problem as well — parents registered their children, but then didn’t show up. The good news, he said, is that states and districts have three more summers to use the $30 billion set aside in the American Rescue Plan for summer and afterschool programs.

“We don’t need to try and make up for everything in six weeks,” he said.

Even so, there’s a sense of urgency about this summer. from nonprofit assessment provider NWEA shows students, on average, made much less progress in the 2020-21 school year than their peers did before the pandemic. Additionally, the and Dworkin’s have launched efforts to support states and districts in ramping up summer programs.

Dworkin said there are ways to make summer learning enticing for both teachers and students.

Setting up under a shady tree is one way.

That’s what Matthew Hathaway, a fourth-grade teacher at Owatin Creek Elementary School in Reading, Pennsylvania, has been doing since 2004. He began offering six students some extra help over the summer from his parents’ back porch, combining math and reading lessons with science activities in a nearby park.

Other teachers asked if they could join him with their students, and prior to the pandemic, his “passion project” had grown to include 120 teachers from 12 schools serving 1,500 students. While his nonprofit is called , the off-site locations include libraries and YMCAs. This year, with help from federal relief funds, the district has added breakfast, lunch and field trips.

Hathaway agreed with Dworkin that teachers especially needed time to recuperate this year. That’s why his part-time model, outside of the classroom, is attractive to teachers, he said. “Kids don’t want to be there all day either.”

Michele Stratton signed up her 9-year-old son Keegan for the program this year so he could get used to socializing with peers again and get some extra help on reading.

“It’s just a different atmosphere when you’re at a park with your friends, rather than sitting on the couch being forced to read by mom,” she said. She recently dropped by to see her son’s small group using different units of measurement to estimate the length of a slide. “In the classroom, you’re limited. Outside, the world is just open to these kids.”

During the school year, some nonprofits revamped their programs to create pods so students — especially those whose parents were essential workers — could have a safe place for remote learning. In San Francisco, the same community-based organizations that provided those “hubs” are now helping to meet the demand for summer learning, despite many obstacles those efforts faced during the school year.

A on the hubs described the political tensions between the school district, the city, the teachers union and community organizations that complicated the push to give the most vulnerable students a place to learn while schools were closed. The fact that non-union staff at the hubs provided in-person services to students was one point of contention for union supporters. “Finding ways around the union, in their view, amounted to carrying water for anti-union politicians,” the report said.

But now, new relationships between principals and afterschool providers have “transformed the conversation” about how they can work together, said Stacey Wang, CEO of the San Francisco Education Fund, which funded the report.

The partnerships have continued, with the school district providing about 10,000 slots for and the organizations that ran the hubs serving another 15,000 students.

Another challenge for districts — especially this year — is ensuring students who need support the most are the ones signing up for programs. Technology can help.

“The funding is there, but you have to take out the friction for districts,” said Rod Hsiao, who launched InPlay, a nonprofit that uses text alerts in multiple language to inform parents about free summer and afterschool opportunities and then simplifies the registration process. The program ensured “that our highest priority students were effectively recruited during our challenging pandemic year,” said Julie McCalmont, coordinator of expanded learning for the Oakland Unified School District.

But it’s what takes place when students arrive at those programs that Clarke, with the National Summer Learning Program, was evaluating when he recently visited Palms Elementary to see America Scores L.A. — one of six finalists for a national Excellence in Summer Learning . The honor recognizes providers that reach underserved students and make extra efforts to involve parents.

“I was blown away,” Clarke said. He was impressed by how active the students were in drills, despite wearing masks in the heat, and how they pitched in to gather equipment and hand out water and snacks.

But he was more taken with what was happening inside the classroom, where teaching assistant and history aficionado Oscar Gonzalez, posed “masterful” open-ended questions to students about what they think the White House looks like, why we shoot off fireworks on the 4th of July and why George Washington became the first president instead of a king.

As students began sketching and writing about their interpretations of the White House, Gonzalez gavea rising first-grader some extra help with letters and counting to 20. L.A. ‘s program, Clarke said, demonstrates that establishing connections between staff and students are essential before focusing on content.

“These are things I train practitioners to do all the time,” he said. He got the sense the soccer program’s staff members knew intuitively how to engage the students because they’ve known them for years. “It felt very authentic.”