Over 20,000 children and young adults visit their neighborhood libraries every day after school. Providing these patrons with engaging, hands-on educational activities can be challenging to branch staff, who have varying levels of experience working with kids and diverse educational backgrounds. The “Programs in a Box” project aims to provide staff with the STEAM content knowledge, pedagogical strategies, and resources they need to engage the children and youth who frequent their branches.

NYPL invested in a team of seasoned educators who collaborate with librarians to create exciting drop-in STEAM curricula, as well as robust training programs to increase the capacity of branch staff to facilitate content-rich, hands-on activities. NYPL educators and librarians developed workshops comprised of four 90-minute lessons on STEAM topics. For example, in “Buzzy Bots and Crawly Critters,” children consider the differences and similarities between living and non-living things through observations of simple robots they make and live animals such as crayfish. Branch staff are provided with supplies and a 3-hour training on the learning material.

These workshops have been popular with branch staff, who volunteer to participate. On average, 30 branches have delivered each workshop series, and we have created 5 series since April 2014; in total, Programs in a Box workshops have been presented 150 times. The experience has shown that branch staff appreciate the curriculum expertise of the educators and require the intensive training and support afforded by the model.