Proof & Reports
Data tells the story. What does your data say?
Two programs, two shapes. One is a single teacher in a single building, followed for three years, because that is how long it takes to see whether a thing sticks. The other is eleven sites in one spring, because that is how you find out whether it travels. Both include what did not work.
The stories
Two programs, measured
Open one to read what happened. Close it again and the next one is waiting underneath — we will stack them here as more are written.
Classroom TO GO · Muessel Elementary, South Bend, IndianaA first-year teacher, the highest literacy gains in her schoolHer fourth graders finished the year at 107% of their literacy growth target, up from 79%. Behavior changed too, and the school went from one classroom to every fourth grade in three years.107%of growth target1styear teaching3 yrsof reordersRead the outcomes
Classroom TO GO · South Bend, Indiana
One classroom, one teacher, three years of evidence
- Highestliteracy gains in the school
- 1st yearof her teaching career
- 79→107%of the literacy growth target
- K→3some reading placements moved
The literacy result
Skylar Thomas teaches fourth grade at Muessel Elementary in South Bend, Indiana. In SY 2022–23 her students posted the highest literacy gains in the school, and she credits the vocabulary work she did inside Classroom TO GO for a large part of it.
The number behind that: her class finished the year at 107% of its literacy growth target, up from 79%. It cleared the year’s expected growth and then some.
The mechanism is specific, and it is hers. Each activity opens on a block of background text. She worked the vocabulary with the class one day, moved to context clues the next, and had students reread the passage in pairs before the build. The science gave the reading a reason to exist.
“The vocab, I was able to do so much with students — make vocab cards with them. It was easier for them to practice context clues. It helped a lot, honestly.”
On where the class landed: “They all moved placements in literacy. Some of them jumped from kindergarten to third grade.”
The behavior result
She raised this before she was asked about it, and the evidence is the gap rather than the presence — a stretch when the program paused.
“I will say it helps so much with behaviors. For a certain time we couldn’t do it and the behaviors were crazy, and then we got to do it again and they were back to normal.”
“Even my students that I usually struggle with, I feel like they benefited the most.” Students who had been hard to reach asked for the next build by name: “Can we please do a project?”
A first-year teacher
All of that happened in her first year in a classroom. She was not an experienced science teacher working around a new product; she was new to teaching and the program was something she could open and run. That is the ease-of-implementation argument, and it is better made by the fact than by us.
The following year she was named Teacher of the Year at Muessel Elementary, and again pointed at the program as part of what made the year work. The gains came first and the award came after. The award is hers.
“I love it. I’m the biggest fan at my school. I tell everybody about it.”
Skylar Thomas, fourth grade, Muessel Elementary School, South Bend, Indiana
Classroom TO GO is sold by grade, and the kit behind this story is the fourth grade one. Every grade from kindergarten up runs the same way.
The curve
A school that kept buying more of it
The strongest evidence in this case study is not a survey. It is a purchase order, three years running, growing each time.
One fourth-grade classroom.
- 26 fourth-grade student kits
- 1 teacher kit
- 1 day of training
Second and third grade join.
- 28 second-grade, 20 third-grade, 25 fourth-grade kits
- 5 teacher kits across the three grades
- 4.5 days of training, plus a follow-up day
Every fourth-grade class in the building.
- 60 fourth-grade student kits
- 2 teacher kits
- Other schools in the district looking at it
Totals: 26 students and 1 teacher in the first year; 73 students and 5 teachers in the second.
What did not work
The part most case studies leave out
We live under a model of continuous learning improvement. Feedback like this is how our experiences get refined, so that what reaches a classroom is the best version of it we know how to make. Every gap gets attention and every problem finds a solution.
The circuit activity
Barely any of the class could get the circuit to light up. She raised it as the clearest miss in the box.
The candy spine build
Students could not get the candy through the ropes. She worked around it — “it was productive struggle” — but it was harder than it should have been.
Missing goggles
Some kits arrived with goggles and some without. Replacements were sent, but it should not have come up.
No online component
Asked for a student portal with an activity in it. The one thing she wanted that the box could not give her.
Drive Into STEM · NAPAEleven auto parts stores, one spring, 800 studentsSaltwater cars built on tables in working stores. Families stayed forty minutes against a typical eight-minute visit, and 97% of students left more interested in automotive careers.11pilot sites1,000kits40+ mindwellRead the outcomes
Drive Into STEM · NAPA
Eleven sites, one spring
A national pilot built to find out whether a hands-on STEM activity could run inside working auto parts stores, and what it would do to the room.
- 11pilot sites
- 1,000kits shipped
- 800+participants
- 40+ minaverage dwell time
The problem NAPA was solving
The automotive trade is short of technicians, and the shortfall lands hardest on the independent shops that are NAPA’s customers. TechForce projects the United States will be more than 802,000 automotive, diesel and collision technicians short by 2028. Over the past decade automotive program graduates fell 12% and collision repair enrollment fell 40%.
Children form ideas about their working lives between the ages of 10 and 13. Most industry outreach reaches high schoolers who have already chosen. This reaches them before they decide.
What actually ran
In spring 2025, students at eleven sites built and raced miniature saltwater-powered cars — a 20 to 30 minute, drop-in build covering electrochemical reactions, energy conversion and mechanical assembly, with a career spotlight on automotive technicians and electric vehicle engineers.
Each site got a turnkey kit, facilitator training and in-store signage. No build-out, no added payroll, a table and one trained person.
- 97% of students said they were very interested in learning more about automotive careers
- 96% of participants were satisfied or very satisfied
- 93% of facilitators felt well prepared after training
- 40+ minutes average dwell, against a typical eight-minute store visit
- 200+ photos and videos submitted by families and staff
Why that is the number to watch
Dwell time is a measure retail already trusts, which is what makes it useful here. A STEM table held families in the store roughly five times longer than a normal visit — and held people who had walked in with no repair to make and no part to buy.
An advertisement buys an impression measured in seconds. This bought forty minutes of a family’s attention, inside the store, with staff talking to them about careers rather than inventory. That is the difference between sponsoring a program and running one, and it is the part that never shows up in a logo on a banner.
Where it ran
Urban, suburban and rural, on purpose
Eleven sites across ten states, chosen to test the activity in different kinds of market and different kinds of room — stores, an auto care center, a corporate headquarters and a homeschool agency.
- McKay Auto PartsLitchfield, IL
- Auto Parts & SuppliesBaton Rouge, LA
- Quality Automotive DistributorsEvansville, IN
- Barron Service PartsWeatherford, TX
- Roanoke Auto SupplyRoanoke, TX
- Modern Auto ServiceFruitland, ID
- Nonfiction AgencyGreenville, SC
- Voorheesville Truck and AutoSchenectady, NY
- Sparks Tire & AutoSt. Charles, MO
- District Manager siteMiddletown, CT
- NAPA HeadquartersAtlanta, GA
What they said
From the people who ran it
“The coolest part was when the first car actually started moving. You could just see the kids light up — big eyes, huge smiles. They’d worked so hard putting the wheels and tank together, and when it clicked, you could feel the whole room shift. That was the moment it became real to them, that science isn’t just something in a textbook.”
“My son said this was the coolest thing we’ve done all month — and that includes the zoo and a birthday party. We talked about careers on the way home, which is not something I expected from a trip to an auto parts event.”
“We had people come in who just saw our ‘STEM Event Today’ sign on the sidewalk. They didn’t have a repair need — they just wanted to check it out with their kids. That doesn’t usually happen at a NAPA store.”
What happened next
The pilot was the beginning of it.
Since spring 2025 the saltwater cars have reached eleven more schools across four states and another 1,800 students. Satisfaction across every program run since the pilot sits at 96.2%. It is not a finished study — it is running now, with partners including the Girl Scouts of the USA and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
- 11new schools since the pilot
- 4states
- 1,800additional students
- 96.2%satisfaction across all programs
Bring it to your schools
Run Drive Into STEM where you are
The activity is turnkey: a table, one trained person, twenty to thirty minutes a build, and no science background assumed.
Stores, districts and community partners have all hosted it. The program page has the whole thing — what arrives, what hosting involves, and the kit itself.
The wider picture
One piece, many kinds of room
Classroom TO GO is our signature classroom science support — what a school buys when it wants science to happen every week rather than once a term. It runs in districts urban and rural across the country, and the shape of it does not change with the setting.
Districts in Louisiana and Tennessee have run it as their summer program spine, one of them buying in a year when the district was cutting elsewhere.
Elementary schools in Kentucky have run it as an after-school block across whole grade bands.
And in South Bend it ran as core science instruction, which is where the literacy result above came from.
If science is thin in your building, this is the piece that fixes it, and it starts one grade at a time.
Primary sources
Or skip us and read the reports
Every program above and below is written up in full and published. These are the documents themselves, not our summary of them.
CEEF Energy Camp 2026
The most recent of the CEEF reports, and the clearest picture of what an energy camp week looks like end to end.
Read the reportOzobot Around the Neighborhood 2026
Built with Ozobot: elementary students program an EVO robot across a printed street grid and meet the working lives of the neighborhood it maps. Career discovery and robotics in the same lesson, for K–2.
Read the reportNASA ASTRO CAMP 2025
A year of NASA ASTRO CAMP TO GO, written for the partner that funds it.
Read the reportDrax Energy Camp 2025
An energy camp built with Drax, reported the same way.
Read the reportNAPA Drive Into STEM 2025
The stakeholder report behind the case study above — eleven sites in one spring, and what the dwell time did.
Read the reportUrban Ecology Camp 2025
Ecology in a city, with the city as the field site.
Read the reportMCM CS Wonder Report 2024
An assessment of a computer science program in Mississippi — the one report here where we are measuring somebody else’s program rather than our own.
Read the reportShell Energy Venture Camp 2023
Built and run with Shell. One of the award-winning camps in this list.
Read the reportThe CEEF and Shell energy camps, which we built and ran with our partners, have won or been finalists in the Gulf Energy Information Excellence Awards in four of the last seven years.
Your turn
What would this look like in your building?
Every one of these started as a conversation about one classroom, one store or one summer. Tell us what you already run and we will work from that.
Start a conversationFunding and grants
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