For many years, our students from Grade 1 to Grade 8 have participated in the Annual STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Fair. This is the culmination of many months of hard work from students, and takes place over two days at the Academy Campus. The STEM Fair offers students a great opportunity to present their projects, which have been created to solve real-world problems. It allows students to enhance their public speaking and presentation skills, as they present their projects in the gymnasium, in front of judges. For example, the students in the image below are presenting a device called the Tree Locator, which would scan a forest area in a 10×10 grid through satellite imaging to identify trees that should be cut down, because of disease or quality, in order to reduce deforestation.
Students from Grades 1-4 are judged upon their use of the scientific process, where they must observe something and try to hypothesize and explain why is has been seen. Grades 5-8 students are judged upon their use of the engineering process, which often times means designing a product (like a machine or computer code) that meets certain criteria and/or accomplishes a certain task to solve a problem. The students in the image below are showcasing their prototype of an Aquifer Forest Dome that will work to keep forest floors moist and reduce forest fires.
Following the STEM Fair is a school wide Bake Sale and STEM activity day, organized by Grade 7 and Grade 8 students, where our Grade 4-6 students acted as tour guides (dressed as scientists), taking younger students to the Bake Sale and to the STEM learning stations. Money collected from our yearly bake sale goes towards the Science department.
This year the STEM activities theme is about how to save the planet. Across the school, students will be trying to come up with new solutions to help protect and save our planet, will enjoy participating in various learning activities using recyclable materials, and will take time to consider the environment and the impact they play on protecting it for the future. This gives our Pre-Kindergarten Montessori to Grade 3 students a great chance to participate in exciting challenges that teach them about science, technology engineering or math. For example, one station taught students about magnets, and explained how there is metal on the ocean floor and gave them a chance to actually try to clean as much metal as they could out of a mock ocean, by using a bucket, magnets and metal items.
Another station allowed students to make a DIY pinwheel completely from recycled materials, such a paper, newspaper, magazines, cardboard, split pins and straws. In this station, students tried to determine how many times they needed to blow air on the pinwheel before it would rotate ten times. At the Grow Green Eco-Pledge stations, students used a stencil to trace a footprint on to the tablecloth and wrote a pledge in the middle about how they will try to live an eco-friendly life. These are just a handful of the excellent initiatives that took place at the school to build awareness of the STEM approach to learning.