STEM Day!

In my first post I made the comment that true STEM is most clearly seen in the workforce, and not in the classroom. If that’s truly the case, why not bring the workforce into the classroom? A few weeks back, we attempted to do just that and hosted our first ever, STEM Career day. This was the culminating event to “Science Week.”

The single overarching goal as we planned out Science Week was to get kids excited about science. The week kicked off with a parody to the LEGO song entitled, “Science Is Awesome” and Family Science Night where parents and kids explored science centers together. The event was packed with families building circuits, identifying constellations, testing the strength of cylinders, building straw towers, exploring the wonders of a “dragon bowl,” discovering the joys of Ooblek and much much more. As the week went on students explored Concordia’s first ES Maker Space and watched a presentation by Mad Science. Although there were pockets of activities and ideas that could be defined as STEM the week was focused on science and it wasn’t until the last day that we truly showed how in our world today scientists rarely stand alone – which is where STEM comes in.

The week ended with STEM Day where the students got to listen to speakers from our community talk about how science impacts their lives. Each speaker covered something different and the topics ranged from computer science, videography, electrical engineering, nutrition, video game engineering to space exploration. It was in this final event that students got a glimpse of what STEM means. How, it takes chemists and engineers and graphic designers and media specialists and an entire team of experts working together to create many of the tools we use and foods we eat. The buzz in the the ES following Science Week and STEM Day gives me hope that we may have a bunch of budding engineers, computer scientists, graphic designers, chemists, mathematicians and astronauts on our hands.