Housed in the school of engineering at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul is a special library chock-full of robots, telescopes, virtual reality goggles and more.

These items aren’t, however, for the college’s engineering students. They make up the Lending Library, available at no cost to Catholic school elementary teachers in the archdiocese for use in their classrooms.

The Lending Library originated from a partnership between the Catholic Schools Center of Excellence in Edina and UST’s school of engineering.

“The goal of the Lending Library is to expose students to engineering projects,” said Michael Gerard, manager of the UST/CSCOE C-STEM library. “These resources offer a different kind of hands-on learning that gets kids excited about STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.”

Christina Robb, kindergarten teacher at St. Peter Claver School in St. Paul, uses Lending Library kits. “I’m able to look ahead at our curriculum and every few weeks bring in something new from the Lending Library,” she said.

“The kids love opening up the kits. It may be something as simple as Lincoln logs, which a number of them had never seen before. Figuring out how they fit together builds problem-solving skills and a sense of accomplishment in the students.”

The library has 42 kits teachers can borrow. Each kit contains classroom materials and lesson plans for an engineering project; half come with lessons on You Tube that give teachers a good idea of how to use them in the classroom.

“The least expensive kit is about $700 and most are in the $9,000 range,” Gerard said. “For many of our Catholic schools, that’s just not affordable. We purchased the kits through a grant from CSCOE, and we drop off/pick them up at no charge to the schools.”

Gerard says Lending Library kits were used 400 times by 55 schools last year; 20 new kits are being added to grow the program.

“The most popular is the classroom set of virtual reality goggles, which offers a unique teacher-led experience,”Gerard said. “For example, if the science topic is oceans, a virtual reality experience viewing and hearing oceans can easily be incorporated into the curriculum with a Lending Library kit.”