Stevens students recently volunteered at the Weehawken Middle School STEM Night, leading a variety of interactive experiments and workshops for the children there.
On February 26, Theodore Roosevelt School, a Weehawken Middle School ranging from third to sixth grade, set up various stations in the school gym where Roosevelt School students were able to learn more about science through performing experiments. The Roosevelt School’s first STEM night was hosted by the Parent Teacher Association with support from the Weehawken High School STEM Club, Robotics Club, and Student Council. Connor McGinley, a ¼ Mechanical Engineering major, was one of roughly a dozen Stevens students who volunteered at the event. “It was fulfilling and fun to help the kids learn more about the spine and civil engineering,” he said, adding that Stevens students ran “a boat-making stand, a marshmallow-spaghetti tower stand, a spine-making stand, and a microcontroller presentation stand.”
The event was a first for Roosevelt School, yet the collaboration and communication with the outside groups were seamless. Groups present included: the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Stevens Health Professionals. All of these groups helped the teachers put on the event, McGinley said. The volunteers helped with “cutting pool noodles for materials or knowing if they had enough marshmallows to make marshmallow-spaghetti towers.” Other Stevens booths “taught the kids about microcontroller boards and buoyancy.”
The Stevens students were joined in putting on the event by several other local groups, including the Weehawken High School STEM club and the Weehawken Public Library. Local high school student, Delia Holland, worked the lava lamp station and described the night as a rewarding experience. “It was really nice seeing the kids enjoying the experiments — it was heartwarming to see the kids be truly amazed by the experiments.”
