CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — You've probably heard about STEM education in schools. STEM stands for science, technology, education, and mathematics. More schools are offering STEM courses to prepare students for careers in science and engineering.
One group of West Oso ISD students were lucky enough to take part in a summer STEM camp and are taking skills they learned in camp into the new school year.
Christina Campos, the STEM teacher at West Oso Junior High School says, “it was just an amazing experience to see the kids and see that “a-ha” moment.”
A moment that has opened young minds and encouraged them to get a little nerdy. Back in July, we took you inside the Code IT camp at Del Mar College. The week-long program exposed junior high students to what it could be like to pursue studies in stem.
“We had robotic college students come and we got to do some of the stuff like control their robots like pick up blocks with the robots,” says Deonica Greenwood who attended the camp.
“They just showed us the robots and how it works, and we did like little stations here and there it was pretty fun,” adds Manuel Alvarez who also attended the camp.
Participants like Manuel and Deonica were shown how to use logic, to design computer codes that command the robots they built. Campos explains, “and then that was super helpful to the kids, and they understood when I'm telling this “sphero” to go one direction, this is the direction I’m going to say so it’s just block coding, and it was super successful.”
But STEM wasn’t the only skillset these mini scientists learned from the camp. “You got to learn a lot and meet a lot of new people,” says Greenwood.
“My favorite part was when we were doing the competition Friday is where with the mBots we were doing the maze we would have to code it, and we had like 15 minutes. Our robot did pretty bad... we got fourth place,” Alverez laughs.
Working as a team, collaborating on experiments, win or lose, it can still be a whole lot of fun.
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