Curriculum, professional development, and hands-on materials are the  key components that make an effective STEM learning environment possible. So, you might be wondering, how does KnowAtom work to transform STEM education? 

Here’s our basic model: We take everything a student needs to experience and make it the totality of a school’s curriculum. The experiences are developed from the Next Generation Science Standards so this doubles as a quick and easy way for schools to engage students, achieve performance on science standardized testing, and align the science and engineering instruction to NGSS.

We change the way educators interpret STEM through professional development. 

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"The best thing that educators could do to make students interested in STEM is show that the STEM areas involve creativity. They allow the student to explore. They’re not these static areas ... There’s room for students to make their own contributions."

Before Joshua Lederman was a freshman at Cornell University in the College of Engineering, planning to major in Applied Engineering Physics, he benefited from the KnowAtom science curriculum while in elementary school. His experience in the STEM disciplines gives him a unique perspective on the impact of a good STEM education.

Now, at Cornell, he is a member of CUAUV, a Cornell project team which designs and builds an autonomous underwater vehicle to compete in the International RoboSub Competition. The following is a transcript of a conversation between Josh and KnowAtom CEO Francis Vigeant.

In this Paths to Innovation conversation, Francis and Josh discuss:

• The different roles on the CUAUV team and Josh's work with the team
• How higher-order thinking translates to college
• The traditional and next generation model from a student's perspective

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