Product reviews for 15-Minute STEM

This is a super book for primary teachers. It aims to help teachers inspire and motivate primary aged pupils in the area of STEM education. Children will love the forty activities which can, as the title suggests, be completed in fifteen minutes but which might be developed and expanded and could be used for homework, after school clubs or parent workshops. If you're looking for engaging ways to make mathematics meaningful in the world, and we all should be, this book is a very useful starting point.

This book doesn't pretend to provide a considered rationale for STEM education or what we might call Primary STEM education. This is an area crying out for greater articulation, for example what is meant by engineering in this primary context? And how exactly does mathematics contribute and benefit, for example, in EYFS? And in Year 6?

However, the idea of fifteen-minute STEM activities is a good one in the respect that it is achievable and might encourage teachers and pupils to engage in a variety of STEM tasks. While these cannot replace a well-organised curriculum of STEM subjects, the activities do provide very useful stimulation and starting points for further problem solving and investigation.