The Jawa Sisters — engineers Melissa and Lavanya Jawaharlal — founded the tech education business STEM Center USA in 2011. Their mission is to share their excitement and enthusiasm about engineering with middle school, high school and college students. (Melissa works at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems; Lavanya is with the Mechanical Engineering program at UC Berkeley.) The STEM Center USA has a physical location in Claremont, CA where students come and discover STEM principles through a hands-on, experiential, learning model.
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In 2014, STEM Center USA launched a product line online. Their popular Pi-Bot Kit is available for purchase. It’s an introduction to mechanical, electrical, and computer science engineering. A number of schools have adopted to the Pi-Bot program including UC Berkeley’s Girls in Engineering Summer School and Google’s Per Scolas Outreach Program in the Bronx. The $99 kit comes with step-by-step building and wiring instructions, sample codes to make it move, and video tutorials.
[On Amazon, there’s also the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 2 (1GB) Ultimate Starter Kit for $84.99
