Olin Saturday STEM Academy

The Olin Saturday STEM Academy was the dream of a retired engineer living and working in the west-Boston suburbs. The idea was to recruit a group of 25 students who live in Boston but attend high school in the suburbs to come out to Olin every Saturday for a full day of engineering and life mastery skills training. This program would work with students starting halfway through 9th grade and keep them involved until they graduated high school. The goal of the program was to introduce African American and Latino students to engineering and provide them with the skills required to gain admission to top schools. The idea was modeled off of the MIT SEED Academy.

Olin had been hoping to find a way to contribute more to K-12 education. When the opportunity was brought forth to house the program and design the curriculum, Olin was quick to provide support. I was able to get involved from the start, helping with the overall program design, observing MIT's program, co-designing the curriculum, and co-teaching for the two semesters of the program's short life.

The first semester was centered around an introduction to electronics. During the semester, we built up a basic understanding of electrical circuits and created a working AM transmitter and radio receiver. Outside of the actual content of electronics, we placed a huge emphasis on the development of "soft skills", such as teamwork and communication, in our lessons. At the end of the semester, each student presented a subset of what they learned to the parents of the group in a small poster session.

We learned a lot from the semester of electrical engineering. First of all, most of the content was fairly unreachable for the students, and we didn't spend enough time on each topic to allow them to fully understand it. Secondly, most of the lessons depended too much on the teaching team's ability to make broken circuits behave. Most of these things were avoided in the second semester, where lessons were based around the design process. We modeled the 10 week program off of an Olin class for first year students ("Design Nature"), allowing our group to focus less on the content and more on the delivery.

The design process requires students to be very creative and generate a number of their own ideas. However, for the past decade, these students have been told what to learn (and often how to learn it) in their classrooms. Instead of giving in and simply telling them what to do, we held firm with the open-ended approach. Many of the students came up with an awesome idea for their hopper, though pushing for multiple good ideas as a starting point remained a tough sell. At each stage of the design process, we explained the basic purpose of the step, showed them an example we built, and then guided them as they worked. By the middle of the course, they were working with Olin students to put their designs into CAD so their parts could be produced in the school's laser cutter. Again, students produced posters at the end of the semester to talk about the design process and show off their hoppers to their parents and friends.

After two semesters, the program ran out of funding from its initial donations and had to shut down. The founders are still actively looking to bring the program back to life, but it will take either a significant government grant or a complete restructuring of the financial model to bring the Olin STEM Academy back.

Downloads / links:

• • Our semester teacher goals (PDF)

  • Our first lesson plan for the semester, an introduction to basic battery-bulb circuits (PDF)

  • The revamped first lesson (as part of a later class project, I drastically improved this first STEM lesson and created a detailed justification of my design decisions)