STEM Rabbit

Challenge

STEM Quest Academy's live classes, taught online and in person at the Dublin, Ohio library, are built around real mentors working with small cohorts, capped at six kids, sometimes one on one. That format is where the deepest learning happens. The opportunity SQA wanted to capture was what came next: giving that same energy a place to live for the rest of the week, so a student who just built loop logic with a mentor on Tuesday had somewhere purposeful and fun to keep building on Wednesday, Thursday, or over the weekend.

The bar was high. It had to be something a kid would choose to open on their own, competitive with the actual games they already play, while still carrying real curriculum underneath it. And it needed its own identity distinct from STEM Quest Academy's self paced flagship platform, SQA Core, since that one is built for self directed learners working through full courses at their own pace. STEM Rabbit needed to be the fun, high energy sibling, one that turns lesson completion into something a kid actively wants to chase.

Approach

We built STEM Rabbit as a complete platform in its own right, with a course catalog, a coin economy, and an arcade, all connected so that practice and play run through the same loop.

The course catalog is organized as quests rather than modules. The Funnest First Course takes a complete beginner through building their first Scratch game across eight lessons. OOP with Scratch introduces object oriented programming through a single hands on project. Platform Run 1 has students build a real platformer game in TypeScript over thirteen lessons. Let's Learn About AI Models makes language models tangible by having kids build one inside Scratch. OOP in .NET goes deeper into object oriented programming through a C# project called Monster Lab. Photomatic has students build a working photo gallery, covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQLite. And STEM Fighter, the most ambitious of the seven, has kids build a full arcade fighting game in Scratch across sixteen lessons, picking up state machines along the way without it ever feeling like a lecture.

Every finished lesson and every correct quiz answer earns coins, and that is the whole engine, learn something, get rewarded right away, and spend that reward somewhere that feels like a genuine prize. Coins are spent inside the SQA Arcade, a set of games built from the ground up rather than licensed, so the entire experience stays inside a platform SQA controls end to end. STEM Copter Missions and STEM Rally anchor the arcade with full campaigns, missions, and boss fights. Pack Rabbit is a maze chase built around outrunning a pack of hunters. Ninjas puts a kid through a side scrolling fight across enemy territory. STEM Fighter, the arcade counterpart to the course of the same name, lets a student battle the computer or another student head to head. Matchy Match and Code Breaker cover puzzle logic for kids who want a shorter session, and the STEM Club Avatars games let students design characters and compete on style under a timer. When a student runs low on coins, the platform points them back to answering more questions rather than a payment screen, keeping the loop anchored in learning first.

STEM Rabbit was built to sit alongside SQA's live classes, not in place of them, giving a mentor's Tuesday session a natural place to continue on a student's own time, online or after a visit to the Dublin library.

Outcome

STEM Rabbit gives every STEM Quest Academy student a reason to keep building in the days between live sessions. Seven quest based courses carry real curriculum, from a first Scratch game through a full fighting game with state machines underneath it, and each one feeds directly into a coin economy that pays off in an arcade purpose built for this audience, ten games deep and still growing. Students arrive at their next live class, whether online or at the library, having already spent time they chose to spend themselves, and the coin loop keeps that time tied directly to what they are actually learning rather than separate from it.