Austin ’25 and Max ’25, provide “hands-on and fun demonstrations, while also inspiring students to pursue independent learning.”
Many students receive a solid foundation for STEM topics through school. However, for students from less privileged backgrounds, public high school STEM education, which focuses on curriculum-based, lecture-style classes, does not fully realize the potential and excitement that can be drawn from scientific discovery. This results in less student engagement and interest in STEM topics than students who benefit from a hands-on lab-based private STEM education.
This is something that we have personally experienced in the public schools that we come from. Our goal is to compensate for any missed STEM experiences by providing hands-on and fun demonstrations, while also inspiring students to pursue independent learning beyond the workshop.
Over the past two years, we have supported students in downtown Albany, New York in finding appreciation and talents in specific topics including 3d printing and ensemble music, with a partnership with the Union College STEP program. This year, we plan to take it a step further by inspiring students to search for their own interests in the exciting and quickly developing world of STEM. We are again planning to partner with Union College’s STEP program, which provides underprivileged middle schoolers a place to discover new passions in science and technology. We plan on leading a two-hour workshop in the middle of August to show the students fascinating science demonstrations from numerous fields, including chemistry, physics, and geometry. These demonstrations will each exhibit unique scientific phenomena and will be unique from what science classes in schools typically present, due to their very specific and applied nature. We plan for these demonstrations to not only be interactive, but also to encourage curiosity in natural phenomena like light refraction, the siphon effect, and aero dynamicity. By encouraging students to make their own hypotheses about why the phenomena we show them happen and how they work, we hope to spark interest in learning about science through observations and curiosity. Additionally, we will introduce to students how we discovered these gadgets, including recommended YouTube channels, books, and websites — where we too were first inspired to delve into scientific discovery — for them to continue exploring after the workshop.