At the end of the day on Friday afternoon, following a rigorous and productive week of schoolwork, the students are rewarded for all of their hard work and dedication. This week the students and staff decided on fun and engaging STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) projects.
These subjects are often combined as a result of the vast need in the United States for workers in these fields after graduation. The High Road Academy of Laurel MD recognized these needs and found an incredible incentive-based way for students to spark an interest in how and why the things around them are the way they are.
In this week’s Fun Friday, the students are allowed to choose from five different classrooms. Each classroom has a different theme. For example: Float Your Boat, which enables the students to make their own paper boats in order to gain a better understanding of buoyancy. The next room was dedicated to Pneumatic Machines. In this room students got to discover their creative side while attempting to invent a simple machine that could achieve a specific task. Room three was the Light Wave investigation. In here students discovered why light moves the way it does through different prisms and how changing the prism would affect the light.
There was even a Rock, Scissor, paper tournament which taught the students about probability and Chance. The final room was in most student’s opinion, the most popular. This room was the Marble Run Room. Marble Run is basically what it sounds like. The students create a course of obstacles for a marble to navigate its way through. This gives the students a chance to exercise their creativity while learning about momentum, geometry and physics.
While the need for people to enter the STEM fields after High School and college persists, the High Road Academy continues to ignite those sparks within students that may very likely carry them to a successful and fulfilling career in STEM.
