Eighty girls attended the eighth annual STEM camp for middle schoolers at the Evergreen Space Museum this week.
The girls cycled through several different sessions, including new offerings in scale modeling and pinball machine construction. Returning sessions include game design, chromatography and 3D printing.
The girls also took a field trip to the Northwest Mothers Milk Bank where they learned about the mission to help premature infants in neonatal intensive care units by providing screened breast milk from donors. The campers labeled bottles, transferred and helped catalog donations, and saw both the pasteurizer and the machine that tests the milk’s nutritional value.
“It has been an incredible year to see the growth of students who now historically have STEM as part of their standard education,” said McMinnville High School science teacher Andrea Brown, who has run the program since its inception. “One of the new projects this year was building a scale model of historical castles. The ability to think independently, problem solve and be creative at the same time has really improved.”
Other participating teachers include David Larson, Taghrid Elmeligui, Kelly Shipley and Audrey Wright.
The camp is funded by a grant from the 21st Century Community Learning Center.