Most importantly, I'm a girl dad to an 11-year-old rockstar. I was a stay-at-home dad until she started school, and we still love working on projects and learning things together.
That is a big part of the inspiration behind timeandspace.science.
My professional background is in business analytics, computer programming, and digital marketing. AI is a newer tool in my toolbox, and I've been using it alongside those skills to see what I can create that is genuinely useful. I decided to build a free resource for students and teachers that my daughter and I could also explore and learn from together.
She's already made dozens of great recommendations that have made the site better. Her perspective is valuable because at school she is learning what I am building.
Now I'd like to take that same idea much further by working directly with K-12 teachers and students.
I want students to help build this.
I'd love to work with individual classes, through their teacher, and ask students to explore the site, experiment with the tools, and come up with ideas for making them more useful, accurate, engaging, and fun.
If a class comes up with an idea that I build, I'd like to give them credit on the site. For example:
"This simulator was inspired by an idea from Ms. Thomas' 5th grade class at Paradise Elementary School in Paradise, California."
Imagine being a fifth grader, coming up with an idea, and later seeing your class credited on a tool being used by students all over the country or on the other side of the world. I think there is something powerful about showing kids that their ideas can become real things that other people use.
I'd like to do the same thing with lesson plans.
If you're a teacher and see something I've already built that could fit into a lesson, please reach out before you teach it. Tell me what you're trying to teach, the grade level, and how you'd like to use the tool. I'll work with you to improve the tool if necessary and develop the lesson plan so we can publish it for other teachers to use.
The teacher, class, or both can be credited for helping create the lesson.
I do have some teaching experience. Earlier in my career, I taught college and graduate-level technology courses for a couple of years. That was more than 20 years ago, though, and teaching K-12 students is obviously very different.
Becoming a dad has also changed the way I think about teaching and learning. Whether we're on the beach building a six-foot sandcastle or diverting a little creek flowing into the ocean, I tend to turn it into a project and make it fun.
What starts as something my daughter and I are doing together, like building something monumental at the beach, often ends up with 10 or 20 kids and parents jumping in, asking questions, helping, experimenting, and adding their own ideas.
I've realized that I really enjoy that part. Building something is fun, but building something that pulls other people in and gets them curious is much more rewarding.
That's a big part of what I want to bring to Time and Space Science. I want to create tools that don't just explain something, but invite students to experiment, ask questions, contribute ideas, and feel like they're part of what is being built.
I'd like to offer what I know to other students while learning from the people who know K-12 education best.
So I'm very open to criticism. Teachers understand their classrooms and students in ways I don't. I want your help figuring out what works, what doesn't, what could be clearer, and most importantly, what would make students curious enough to keep exploring.
Long term, I'd like Time and Space Science to become more than a collection of free educational tools and lesson plans. I'd like it to become a community where teachers and students contribute ideas, those ideas become new resources, and what one classroom creates can help another classroom somewhere else.
If that sounds interesting, I'd love to work with you.
Lars Estrem
timeandspace.science
