Junior Achievement STEM Day Recap

  Recently this week, the freshmen class of 2022 went to a STEM inspired set of activities in the gym called “Junior Achievement”. The activities were designed to try to spark an interest in either science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. Which is exactly what stem stands for!

  The freshmen were separated into groups of 20 to 30 people and assigned a color. The group color they were given would give them a wristband of the same color. The students were held in the auditorium and a guest speaker came to talk about some of the activities other visitors would be presenting for us. She then sent them in their way to the gym.

  There was a total of 9 or possibly 10 groups. Colors consisted of red, tan, yellow, purple, and orange to name a few. Some of the activities they had which I personally found fun and really interactive was the foam hands and robotics section.

   For the foam hands section, the students were tasked with mixing together a chemical substance to put inside of a white latex glove. Over the span of five minutes the gloves mixture began to harden and heat up. At the end of the day when students picked up their foam hands, they were completely hard but now room temperature.

  The robotics part sounded easy enough but was way more challenging then I had originally thought.There were two robots against another two robots. While this wasn’t the “battle of the bots” type of situation it didn’t lesson the fun. Students were separated into teams within their groups and given two controllers to move the robots which had a claw that could move up and down. The main goal was to push the red/blue cones over a red/blue line for points. Then they had to stack the orange cones on top of black cones. At the end of almost ten minutes per team, all the points were counted up. The highest points that day was 61, and the yellow group came second with 59 points.

  If that doesn’t sound fun enough, the groups also went into stations to test their geometry, strategy,building, and biology skills. All of the science and mathematics challenges were for points as well.

  In the end, final points were counted up for fun bags full of little prizes such as food! The guest speaker asked the students if they learned any new and valuable information and almost every hand shot straight up. Overall, it was an interesting experience that the next class of freshman will enjoy too. Can’t wait for next years!