SpinWheel Brings STEM Education into Your Home

The last few months have been taxing for our world, facing a pandemic of a scale new to our generation. And, in this critical time, science is one of the most important tools in addressing this challenge. The Yale Society of Women Engineers (Yale SWE) are steadfast in their mission of reaching every young curious mind and empowering them to make the world a better place. Yale’s STEM outreach events have been rescheduled in the near term, but the many teams of volunteers preparing these events remain committed to their efforts and are ready to provide even richer and more wondrous educational opportunities.

One such team is the outreach branch of the Yale SWE, and their SpinWearables initiative. A team headquartered at Yale, with graduates now at University of Michigan, Harvard, and MIT, has been working on tools to teach science and engineering through creative and artistic activities that unleash the inherent creative powers of children and circumvent the challenges that math phobia presents. As the SpinWearables team is located in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Michigan, they have been collaborating remotely for the last year, demonstrating that great things can be achieved even when physical interaction is limited.

Earlier this month, the team launched a Kickstarter project to fund their STEM outreach efforts for the upcoming year. The team has developed a beautiful wearable electronic device, the SpinWheel, around which they have built a substantial collection of programming, science, and art activities. Yale SWE’s expertise in meshing art and science together in educational activities is distilled in the SpinWheel: the wearable device contains motion sensors that enable lessons and experiments in kinematics, magnetism, and other fields of physics; the colorful LEDs enable many artistic visualizations based on the sensor’s measurements, creating jewelry that responds to the wearer; the micro-computer on the device offers fertile ground for exploring programming and computer science, letting students learn how to create their own unique visualizations. Exciting students in creating beautiful LED patterns is how the SpinWheel sneaks the knowledge of wondrous math and physics in. In this way, the SpinWheel empowers students to learn and teaches them that they have the potential to solve the challenges of the future.

All proceeds from project will go back into Yale SWE’s outreach efforts, including many new events based around the SpinWheel itself. Similar to their “Fractal Art” math and coding activity, the SpinWheel will enable the team to teach mathematics as a tool for beauty and creativity. And building upon their “Dancing with Colors” events, the SpinWheel will enable lessons in physics and into the biology and physics of sight.

Visit the Kickstarter page to support this project and help create the next generation of problem solvers.