In honor of Stevens’ 150th anniversary, two students, Luke Langner and Joan Tubungbanua, along with their committee, have launched the 150for150 project. This project aims to host 150 STEM workshops at local schools for K-12 students between March 2020 and March 2021.
The goals of this project include serving the Hoboken community while promoting Stevens and STEM education. Additionally, this project seeks to engage Stevens students in a service project aimed at civic engagement, which will help to promote their personal and professional development. This all ties back into the Stevens mission statement which is “to inspire, nurture and educate leaders in tomorrow’s technology-centric environment while contributing to the solution of the most challenging problems of our time.”
In total, the student committee working on this project has developed 14 different workshops that are divided into four groups. The groups are broken down into kindergarten through second grade, third through fifth grade, middle school, and high school. Some of the activities for the two younger groups include elephant toothpaste, fake snow, and Alka-Seltzer lava lamps. For the middle and high school students, there are activities like Alka-Seltzer rockets, marshmallow towers, Arduino programming, web development, and building a helping hand.
Back in May 2019, the committee working on the 150for150 projects began their development of these ideas. Since then, they have had over 50 students show interest in being presenters, with a large number of them already trained to present workshops. Currently, there are 38 workshops scheduled across a number of different schools. There are workshops scheduled at the Hoboken Charter lower, middle, and upper schools, as well as at the Elysian Charter school. There will even be workshops hosted in Spanish for the HoLa Hoboken Dual Language Charter School.
This past week, the first session was held for TRUE Mentors at the Jubilee Center. The first-grade through eighth-grade students there participated in the fake snow activity. One of the Stevens students participating in the project, Teresa LaParch, said, “We demonstrated a workshop called ‘Fake Snow’ in which students learn about the weather cycle and then make fake snow out of shaving cream and baking soda. Then we discussed the purposes of either ingredient, what jobs they performed in making fake snow, and how adding or lowering ingredients impacted our fake snow ‘quality.’ We even built little snowmen and snowballs. It was so much fun, very fulfilling.”
For more information about the 150for150 project, you can email stevens150for150@gmail.com if you are looking to be involved either as a student or to get your school involved in this project for students to learn about STEM. You can follow them on Instagram at @s150for150.
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