NEWS PHOTO BRENDAN MILLER
Students and parents of Crestwood STEM School program robots during a family night Thursday. The school partnered with Medicine Hat College and the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta to provide students a hand-on engineering challenge.
bmiller@medicinehatnews.com
Thursday evening Crestwood STEM School came alive with robots, virtual reality and engineering challenges during the schools annual Family STEM night that brings families together with industry professionals, Medicine Hat College and the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.
The open-house style event allowed students to show skills they have been developing in numerous STEM career pathways to their families as well as connecting those students with college instructors and professional engineers to explore real-world problem solving and encourage early exposure to science and engineering.
“Just little pieces that families can learn and explore what their kids are learning in school about,” said Richelle Thomas, principal of Crestwood STEM School.
Along with classroom displays, families were invited to join engineers and instructors and discover how different designs can impact a bridge and how much pressure it would take to for each bridge design to fail with a real world demonstration.
“Medicine Hat College and APEGA have put together a building bridge challenge, so everything is connected to structure and what happens if you change different components of building a bridge,” explains Thomas.
Each year during Family STEM Night, the school offers different demonstrations related to integrated learning.
“Our focus has really been on fostering that critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and community with our kids,” says Thomas. ” So having lots of real life problems for them to experience and to solve, and then really focusing them on being able to communicate and collaborate with each other on what their ideas are and how they go through that design thinking phase to problem solve a solution.”
MHC dean of arts, science and education, Clay Bos, told the NEWS he has found success in several STEM related jobs due to his foundation of education and now also works as a professional engineer alongside his duties at the college.
“I think the biggest benefit is the amount of pathways and doors that it opens. People think of the traditional scientist or chemist or physicist or engineer, some of those traditional jobs, which there’s a lot of demand for, but there’s so many more pathways and so many different experiences.
“There’s so many pathways and so many doors that open when you have that foundational, fundamental understanding of science.”
The dean also says children often enter the world of science to make it a better place and hopes the educational opportunity sparks excitement among young kids who are excited about learning.
“I think it’s super important to engage with the kids, see the looks on their faces, the smiles on their face, those little light bulbs lighting up, because it reminds us that we were in that same position too, and we still have that desire and that passion to learn and that passion to understand our world.”
