Q&A with Allison Grabert, director of Southwest Indiana STEM Resource Center at USI
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The Southwest Indiana STEM Resource Center is celebrating the 15th anniversary of its equipment lending service at the University of Southern Indiana. The service allows local educators to access high-quality STEM resources in a cost-effective manner.
Allison Grabert, director of the SwISTEM Resource Center, spoke with Inside INdiana Business about how the equipment lending service has changed over the years and what teachers must do to participate in the program.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the SwISTEM Resource Center.
The SwISTEM Resource Center was created in 2007 from part of a National Science Foundation grant and a workforce development grant that we received. The National Science Foundation grant was an undergraduate research grant. From a piece of that, we began the STEM Resource Center.
The workforce development grant was used to create the Southwest Indiana STEM Equipment Lending Service. From that grant, we bought all the equipment that we needed. We bought the trucks we needed to deliver the equipment to area schools.
Shortly after that funding was approved, we convened focus groups that included K-12 teachers, USI faculty, STEM stakeholders and business and industry professionals. Everybody got together here at USI, and we did a needs analysis on what K-12 STEM education needed in our region.
From those focus groups and meetings, we determined three prongs would drive our mission and vision for the STEM Resource Center. The first one was the equipment lending service, which provides free lab equipment and STEM educational resources to 13 counties in the region for free. We go out and deliver this equipment to classrooms every single week. It’s completely free of charge, and it includes delivery and pickup.
The second prong was teacher professional development. Teachers needed access to more rigorous STEM professional development. These learning communities were important.
The third prong was that families and students needed ways to plug into STEM outreach events like the Tri-State Science and Engineering Fair, robotics competitions, summer camps and things of that nature.
So we began to attack those three gaps. The first one was the equipment lending service that’s been extremely popular and beneficial for our K-12 teachers. And we’ve worked to bolster our catalog of events where K-12 students can come in, plug into a STEM community, compete and be recognized for their work in the STEM disciplines.
And then, teacher professional development, we do our best, although that is one of our big funding gaps right now is to have teacher professional development opportunities during the summer. That’s what we’re currently seeking funding for.
What topics do these STEM resources cover?
It runs the gamut, honestly. We first started the equipment lending service in September 2009, that was our inaugural run. Most of the equipment—because the inventory list was developed heavily by USI faculty teaching undergraduate chemistry, physics and math—was geared toward high school. And it is needed, especially for our rural and under-resourced schools.
But as we continued through the years, we began to hear from a lot of middle school and elementary school teachers who said, “I need stuff for our classroom. Is there anything we can use to teach waves?” Or to teach weather, organisms, biodiversity and photosynthesis.
At that point, we started looking at what our middle school and elementary school teachers needed, and we started bolstering our inventory to include them. If you look at our circulation numbers for the past eight or nine years, you can see that most of our circulation is happening within the elementary and middle school classrooms.
You can get anything from microscopes to sine wave generators to 3D printers to robotics kits. We have Lego kits. We have Spheros and IndyCars. We have a huge assortment of Vernier probes and Vernier LabQuests. Just about any academic standard that you’re needing to teach in K-12, we have something for you.
We’ve also been working to create a library of curriculum. We’ve noticed in the past several years that our teachers don’t have a lot of experience teaching the subjects they’re assigned. They’re having to transition into science and mathematics teaching rather quickly. We needed to make sure we had curriculum available for them so they can be successful in teaching those academic standards, even if they’ve had very little or no experience.
At the end of the year, we send a survey out and say, “What cutting-edge pieces of equipment would you like to see us include in our inventory?” We send this to teachers, and we get a nice list. With the end-of-year monies, if we have any left over, we can go in and start plugging those holes and buying that equipment for them.
The last two years, we’ve noticed we have preschool teachers who are interested in teaching computational thinking and logistical thinking to their kids via these technological educational resources that are coming out. We have started to look for and include items for preschool teachers to teach STEM disciplines in their classrooms. And it’s been popular.
What are the main benefits of the equipment lending service for students and teachers?
Number one, they don’t have the school funding to purchase expensive equipment. A classroom set of microscopes can cost thousands of dollars. And if you’re only pulling them off the shelf once or twice a year, it’s difficult to justify to an administrator or school board that you need to purchase those.
The Vernier LabQuests are about $350 a piece without the probeware. If you add a probeware set, one Vernier LabQuest, plus a series of five or six probes to measure temperature, pH, a colorimeter, a motion detector—one set can run $2,000. It’s difficult to get one set into a classroom, let alone seven to 14 of these.
It just makes sense if you’re not going to use the equipment every single day, and you’re going to have a hard time justifying the purchase of that equipment in your classroom. Then just use it for free. We’ll drop it off, and we’ll pick it up. It’s a resource-sharing model, so even schools that don’t have big bases to spend a lot of money on science and technology, their students are still capable of accessing that equipment through the equipment lending service.
Even in cases where teachers have a nice STEM budget or a science teaching budget to purchase materials and supplies, we found that they don’t have room to store them. They don’t have a lot of room to store a skeleton, physics tracks and all the LabQuests. Maybe they don’t have the budget to maintain all that equipment.
Our equipment gets bundled up in a tote and delivered to the school. They can use it, put it back in the tote and send it back to USI. We can refurbish it, make any repairs that need to be done, clean it and put it back on the shelf until they need it again next year.
We had a student from New Tech Institute in Evansville. She was using Vernier LabQuest and the probeware in high school through her physics teacher. She also participated in the Tri-State Science and Engineering Fair, and she was very successful. She went up to state and won some awards.
When she got to Rose-Hulman [Institute of Technology], she was so far ahead of the rest of the kids in her class, because in the labs they were using Vernier probeware. She didn’t have to learn how to use the technology they were required to use in her laboratory classes, so she felt like she had a leg up.
Who can use the equipment lending service, and how do they sign up?
We deliver to 10 counties in southwest Indiana, two in southeastern Illinois and one in western Kentucky, totaling 13 counties. We partner with NSWC Crane’s STEM outreach team with some equipment available for pickup at their WestGate office through Tina Closser, STEM Outreach Coordinator. Equipment is available to the “donut counties” surrounding the Naval Warfare Center, but free delivery and pickup are limited to those areas.
We haven’t had much luck getting the message out to those counties in western Kentucky. We service Henderson, and we have gone farther. We work with the teachers. Say we had someone in Madisonville who needed to borrow the equipment. We would work with them to meet or drop it off at a public library, and they can pick it up from there.
As far as we can extend it to local students in our area, we’re going to do everything we can to make it happen. But we do have a finite amount of equipment, and we have a finite amount of time to get those items delivered. Even going to Jasper from USI, which we service Jasper about every week, it’s an all-day trip if you put other stops in there. We have to get creative about our delivery and pickup routes.
To become a part of the service, go to our website and click on the Equipment Lending Service page. The first thing to do is print and fill out our new patron form. We ask that teachers fill out one of these every year. That is a statement of assurances that the equipment will be locked up when it’s not being used and supervised. All those things that protect our equipment and make sure everybody’s on the same page.
They can begin reserving equipment once they’ve turned that in that form. They can email it back to us, mail it back to us or we can pick it up on the first day of delivery. They can look through our database, and there is an online form they can complete to reserve the equipment.
We oftentimes have teachers who email us and say, “I’m teaching about frogs this week. Help! What can I do? I want it to be hands-on. Do you have any materials that I can use for the kids?” And we’ll give them ideas on what we have and what kind of lessons they can give.
The best way to do that is to email us from our webpage, and we can work to find curriculum or activities that work well in the classroom that are either brand new or expand upon the lesson plans they already have. We typically do two-week checkouts.
What’s new for the SwISTEM Resource Center in 2025?
We are transforming a section of Rice Library into a STEM lab for K-12 field trips. The remodeling is underway, and we anticipate welcoming student visitors this fall.
We also secured a NEEF grant to develop environmental education programs utilizing our scenic campus trails. Phase one includes the construction of a learning pavilion and extending a footpath through our beautiful hardwood forest along our largest rock-bottom creek and rocky cliffs on the easternmost side of campus.