SWE Presents the Educational SpinWheel, and a Kickstarter Campaign

Introducing the SpinWheel - a colorful, wearable, programmable STEM educational kit created by graduate students in the Yale Society of Women Engineers!

Aimed at teaching science in a more tangible way to middle and high school students, the kit comes with a set of physics and computer science lessons that students can follow to turn the SpinWheel into a compass, a step counter, a way to explore how vision works, and much more. The SpinWheel kit launches on Kickstarter on March 16, 2020. All proceeds go towards funding Yale Society of Women Engineers science outreach events for students across Connecticut.

United by a passion for teaching science and engineering, SEAS and Physics PhD students Elise Bullock, Jenna Ditto, Bridget Hegarty (PhD ‘19), Stefan Krastanov (PhD ‘19), Emily Kuhn, Rebecca LaCroix, and Samantha Pagan began developing the SpinWheel during the summer of 2019.

Based on their experiences with other science outreach activities, the group of graduate students learned that students of all skill levels were excited by LED programming. That led the team to design the SpinWheel with a set of LEDs that can be programmed to create fun, beautiful patterns. The associated educational guide assumes no prior physics or computer science experience, making it accessible to students of all levels. 

The SpinWheel team is committed to inspiring more girls and minorities to pursue science and engineering, and seeks to use the SpinWheel to spark students’ interest in these fields and explore the wonders of STEM outside the classroom. Feedback from student beta-testers and after outreach events with earlier iterations demonstrated that such activities can convince students to “explore programming in the future” and “start messing with electronics more.”

To learn more about the SpinWheel and sign up for updates when the Kickstarter campaign launches, visit www.spinwearables.com.