For Immediate Release
Through a grant from the Ross Foundation, students from Ritchie County High School are experiencing an Onsite STEM Fieldtrip this week through the Betabox Mobile Tech Lab. Betabox offers world-class hands-on learning built from scratch with the latest technologies and concepts emerging from industry. These experiences harness the intrinsic interests of your students to teach STEM and design fundamentals. Betabox experiences are onsite field trips that take place in the school’s parking lot.
The events was produced by Betabox, a Raleigh, NC company that provides mobile experiential labs to schools around the country. The company sends mobile labs to schools to provide an enriching and immersive learning environment.
“From the beginning, we have tried to lower the per-student cost of hands-on learning. Our high end mobile tech labs are designed to create an engaging learning space for students to collaborate and explore new areas.” says Sean Newman Maroni, Betabox founder and CEO.
Betabox provides a number of mobile labs from which schools can choose a field trip. These include virtual reality, robotics, and DNA extraction labs. There is even an option for students to interact with the Watson technology which was made famous when the IBM software defeated two Jeopardy! Champions.
While the students were in the mobile lab, their teachers were provided with professional development on how to create makerspaces in the classroom.
“Ultimately, we want to inspire educators to integrate more hands-on learning into their classrooms by showing them how engaged students are when they are in a tech lab,” Maroni says.
Ritchie County High School students may not be the only ones to benefit from Betabox. The Ross Foundation is looking to partner with other West Virginia schools.
“I’m excited to support this initiative to encourage and provide an opportunity for students to be part of this mobile STEM learning activity”, said Tres Ross, Executive Director of The Ross Foundation. “I look forward to how schools take this experience and apply it to what they will implement through their Blended Learning program.”
Maroni believes the current “sage on a stage” model for delivering science instruction is dated. Tomorrow’s professionals need hands-on learning today. The on-site field trip these West Virginia students experienced is at the cutting edge of science instruction.
About Betabox
Betabox creates and operates mobile educational facilities for some of the world’s most respected districts and schools. Betabox’s mission is to engage 1 million young people in hands-on, real-world educational experiences by 2020. Our national networks of modular tech labs can be configured with rapid prototyping, life sciences, and digital technologies curated to support a variety of educational and new product development initiatives. To learn more about Betabox’s mission and products, visit www.betaboxlabs.com or email sales@betaboxlabs.com.