Dearius Williams and his buddy, Ryan Dore, are mostly here for the fun.
The 9-year-old Broad View Elementary students showed up after hours Thursday night for an event aimed at — sssshhhhh — learning.
The Oak Harbor school was turned into a network of 10 mini-labs, where students and their families wandered from room-to-room to try manipulating materials and working through puzzles and problems.
Each of the activities challenged students and their parents to develop or create something. More than 40 volunteers were on hand to guide everyone through the experience.
Dearius and Ryan became young engineers, building towers out of plastic cups in one room and testing the strength of bridges made of soup cans and paper in another.
The evening was the first ever STEM Family Night at the school.
STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math. It’s a growing national movement aimed at integrating more of these fields into school curriculums to improve America’s competitiveness in high-tech fields.
As a school, Broad View has dived into STEM, with teachers completing training and integrating new activities into the classroom.
Broad View has always been a “science-friendly” school, said librarian Donna Aspery. The school formerly used science kits that were pretty good, but the STEM training adds more engineering to the curriculum, she said.
It also creates a more meaningful and authentic learning experience because it gives students a problem to solve that doesn’t necessarily have one right, prescribed answer.
Students, for instance, might be given a bag of materials and asked to build a car that travels a certain distance. Students have to think through how to solve the problem. They have to use creativity and analytical skills.
“It’s up to them to figure how to get to the end,” she said. “There are no steps to follow, no one way to do it. It’s inquiry-based learning that leads you down a path to discovery.”
Aspery, a long-time teacher before she became a librarian, has filled the school library with STEM-friendly activities that kids can use, such as robots that they can write code for that will amble down a path and spin around.
Thursday, Kimora Lynch, 9, and her mom stuffed cotton balls, newspapers and felt into a box. They were trying to figure out how to keep a film canister filled with coins quiet.
“It gets her thinking,” said mom, Rolanda Basham. “And she’s having fun.”
In the library, Ron Haymaker helped his daughter, Jessica, 8, build a colorful plastic tube maze. She put a marble in the top, and watched as it zigzagged through. Dad works as an Army engineer, and sees our society only becoming more driven by technology.
“I think the kids need it,” he said. “We’re in a technological world nowadays.”
