More than 55 middle school students attended a STEM camp at Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum last week. The four-day camp is designed to improve science, technology, engineering and math skills through hands-on projects.
In honor of the Great American Eclipse, new sessions featured an eclipse unit, as well as a new math-based unit on pinball machine construction. Returning sessions include computer programming and game theory; and chromatography and 3D printing.
“We were able to take advantage of a teachable event by including a session on astronomy and the eclipse,” said McMinnville High School science teacher Andrea Brown, who is the lead teacher for the program.
“We also built math skills in a fun way with Siria Larmay, a high school ELL math tutor, focusing on lagging skills she has seen in incoming ninth graders. I’m hearing kids say, ‘I really like math this way!’”
Other district teachers who run sessions at the camp include Taghrid Elmeligui, David Larson and Suzanne Jensen.
The camp is funded by grants from the 21st Century Community Learning Center and Title III.