STEAM Spaces

Tennessee District Turns Bus into Mobile STEAM Lab

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 01/18/18

Tennessee's Johnson City Schools is refurbishing a school bus to be a mobile STEAM lab to provide students at eight elementary schools hands-on learning opportunities.

The school board wanted to put a new STEAM space into every school, but that would have been prohibitively expensive and those spaces may have gone unused many days.

"Instead of having this expensive technology in every school that may or may not be used every day why not put it on a bus that can go around to each elementary school," Amy Stover, with the Johnson City Public School Foundation said in a local report on the move.

This spring, the district is asking teachers with students in grades 3 and 4 to design lessons that they would like to be able to lead on the new bus while career and technical education students from Science Hill High School redesign the interior of the vehicle throughout the spring.

"We'll have these modules set up and ready to go lessons all the teacher has to do is bring their kids on the bus and teach the lesson," Stover added.

"We may have everything from learning how to code robots, we may have everything from learning how to design and print in 3D, we definitely will have some environmental science modules to go along with what it takes to be green," said David Timbs, supervisor of secondary and instructional technology at the district, in a local report.