How An IndyCar Team Is Using A Children’s Toy To Generate Interest In Stem Education

Paretta Autosport’s IndyCar team and associate sponsor KiwiCo are hoping to use a children’s toy, known as an educational “crate” to help youngsters generate an interest in Stem education.

Stem is an acronym for “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.”

Over the past several decades, school systems and universities around the United States began steering students away from vocational classes, once a hallmark in junior high and high schools, to liberal arts courses.

Instead of shop class, courses were created in humanities and sociology. As several decades have passed, the United States has a severe shortage in craftsman and tradesman, such as plumbers, carpenters, welders, mechanics, and other key skill jobs that are vital to keep the infrastructure growing.

By combining Paretta Autosport with KiwiCo, the goal is to create interest in young children to pursue a Stem education.

It’s a consumer product that has a future mission in Stem education.

“That is exactly why I started a team,” said IndyCar team owner Beth Paretta. “I was working for Fiat Chrysler in 2014 and saw the engineering shortage and where that was going and what the implication was going to be for car companies, suppliers, aviation and industrial.

“That was the impetus for me to start the team, first in Sports Cars and now moving into IndyCar. As a car company, you are recruiting from colleges and colleges are recruiting from high schools. They need to start younger.”

Paretta knew that by reflecting on her own life.

“I should have been an engineer, but neither of my parents were, so they couldn’t identify it in me and then cultivate it and push me in that direction,” she said. “Lifting the veil on how education ties to careers are helpful for parents.

“Sometimes, your kids might show genius in an area that might be different than you. Parents also need to be able to push their kids along into something they love.”

About KiwiCo

Enter KiwiCo, which creates educational “crates” that kids are able to design and build toy cars from the parts supplied in the crate.

Paretta Autosport was looking for an associate sponsor for their NTT IndyCar Series team that has a limited three-race schedule featuring driver Simona de Silvestro from Switzerland.

Their story was told in last week’s SportsMoney feature.

“I work with a sports marketing agency that are very good about actively finding sponsors,” Paretta explained. “They found them. They are in the Stem learning toy category and we cold-called them. They have little race car crates. We said if they wanted to amplify their message, this might be a great way.

“They took our call and here we are.”

Katie Soo is the chief marketing officer at KiwiCo. I had a chance to speak in depth with Ms. Soo about the value of her company getting involved with an IndyCar team and how it can help spark an interest in young students to pursue a Stem education by capturing their imagination.

“We are very excited at KiwiCo to be a part of supporting something that’s so mission oriented, mission focused,” Soo said. “A lot of our business is really about giving creative confidence for kids, preparing them for Stem careers. What better way to do that than to partner with Paretta to bring that to life?

“We talk a lot about different types of engineering skills, different types of aerodynamic skills that you can learn. There’s really no better way to do that than to partner with Indy and Paretta, bring those components to life, help the next generation with learning and development.

It’s a “Crate” Experience; Not a Toy

Don’t call this project kits, “toys,” though.

“We call them crate experiences,” Soo continued. “It is incredibly valuable to create that interest because discovery is such an element of learning and development.

“We call them crates and they are learning hands-on experiences. We have nine different lines and serve every age group from baby toddler to adults.

“I think it opens up the possibility that science and engineering can be accessible to all.”

The crate lines serve every single age group from baby, toddler all the way up to 18-and-over. There are even projects that got up to 104 years of age.

The goal is to create a lifelong journey of learning, a lifelong journey of tinkering.

“The idea we could give creative confidence to kids so they could realize all the different careers that they could have in racing, they could have in sports, probably wasn’t available to them before,” Soo said. “We want to be able to enable more people to discover these career paths.

“KiwiCo’s mission is always making that accessible. This was naturally just the right kind of partnership for us to do.”

KiwiCo has been around for 10 years, and the mission has always been to encourage discovery of Stem careers, projects, types of work that are very underserved. The products are available in 45 countries.

“The whole idea is letting people know you can be a race car driver, you can work on a race team, you can be an engineer,” Soo continued. “It doesn’t matter your gender, background, education, or anything. It’s a life-long of learning and you can do it at every single stage of your age group. At any age, you can still tinker, innovate and create a bunch of content.

“When I joined the business, a big part of what we wanted to do was expand our audience and also get KiwiCo exposed to people who would want that type of learning and development. When I met Beth Paretta, it was so natural and made so much sense because not just the angle of getting more women involved in racing, but it made sense for us to help people learn there were possibilities to do careers here and our crates can help facilitate that.

“I got a note from someone on our team reaching out to see if we were interested in collaborating and telling the story about Beth’s team and how it is all about learning development and creating more opportunities about women. I have a history of coming to Indy so naturally I was hooked in. The more I learned about the mission, the more it made sense for us to collaborate.”

KiwiCo has “popups” for kids to work on during races so they can better understand what the company is all about. Those have been distributed at the Sonsio Grand Prix of Road America on June 12 and the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio Presented by the All-New Honda Civic Type R on July 3.

“I think that is why the discovery is so important because every single job and career in industry, there is so much science that comes into that that when it clicks, you will have confidence to make those decisions,” Soo said.

Paretta Autosport is a “female forward” IndyCar team that partnered with Team Penske in the 105^th Indianapolis 500 in 2021. This year, the team chose a three-race street and road course schedule that also includes the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix on the streets of Nashville, Tennessee on August 7.

In 2022, Paretta Autosport is partnering with Ed Carpenter Racing instead of Team Penske, as that team is focused on a three-car IndyCar program while creating an IMSA and WEC sports car program with Porsche.

Carpenter is a family man with four children and is quite familiar with KiwiCo.

“When Beth told me about KiwiCo, I knew Kiwi Crates,” Carpenter told me. “My kids have those. It’s a great tool and can be a great asset for IndyCar. We’re all trying to reach new audiences that will be old fans someday. It’s a great partner and one of many new partners that are coming in and doing great things for the series.”

The team continues to search for a full-time sponsor, but it’s active involvement with its associate sponsor at KiwiCo can play a vital mission in create renewed interest in Stem education.

“Our mission with Paretta Autosport has been to grow the sport of racing, in the paddocks, in the stands, and viewers at home,” Paretta said. “We want to capture the imagination of kids by connecting what we do on track to learning off the track, knowing this interest could be the foundation to Stem-based careers.”