With public funding of schools falling short, community and corporate goodwill is more vital than ever to help students keep up. The latest example was shown off this morning in Landon Bell‘s kindergarten classroom at Lafayette Elementary in The Admiral District. The “kindergarten technologists” in our photos are using Snap Circuits (shown and explained here) to explore electrical engineering, creating working machines on circuit boards.

Lafayette got the Snap Circuits via a request on the crowdfunding site for teachers, DonorsChoose.org, one of 19 projects at 15 Seattle schools that were funded in a donation by AT&T, according to the announcement of this morning’s demonstration.

Many DonorsChoose projects are funded by individual community contributions, but as was the case here, the corporate community jumps in too – you might recall the Google announcement at Highland Park Elementary last month. Much other supplementary funding comes via events organized by schools’ PTAs (at Lafayette, last month’s Walk-A-Thon – with community sponsors including WSB – raised $60,000 in pledges).

P.S. If you’re interested in donating to classroom projects, DonorsChoose is searchable by zip code, and our quick check shows lots of current requests from local teachers.