We Are People Who Love Airplanes, History, and Sharing Our Passion With Youngsters

In an ever-changing, increasingly complex world, it’s more important than ever that our nation’s youth are prepared to bring knowledge and skills to solve problems, make sense of information, and know how to gather and evaluate evidence to make decisions. These are the kinds of skills that students develop in science, technology, engineering and math—disciplines collectively known as STEM. If we want a nation where our future leaders, neighbors, and workers have the ability to understand and solve some of the complex challenges of today and tomorrow, and to meet the demands of the dynamic and evolving workforce, building students’ skills, content knowledge, and fluency in STEM fields is essential. We must also make sure that, no matter where children live, they have access to quality learning environments. A child’s zip code should not determine their STEM fluency. — U.S. Department of Education

For the academic and community institutions the Foundation was founded to serve we supply external curriculum enrichment resources. We know that we love historically significant airplanes and talking about them but we also know that, for most of us, teaching middle school youngsters was not in our training. The Foundation, therefore, depends on the schools who take advantage of the resources we offer to make STEM (and the associated concepts), concrete and approachable. A picture is worth a thousand words but being able to see a mathematical, engineering or scientific principle in action cannot be put into words.