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ISTEM Festival 2023
ISTEM Festival 2023
The International STEM Festival is two events in one: half cultural awareness and half an interactive STEM exhibit. The cultural area includes student exhibits and booths filled with multicultural food and artifacts from local international community members. The STEM area allowed students to showcase their STEM projects. Local universities (multiple Texas A&M student organizations) and businesses (Code Ninjas, Mathnasium, etc) host informational and interactive booths.
Mad Science Night
Mad Science Night
Science Night always occurs at the beginning of the school year to help open both students' and parents' eyes to various opportunities. I borrowed the Apollo helmet, the shuttle extravehicular activity (EVA) glove, and space food samples from the Johnson Space Center Exhibits. I was able to get the Texas Space Grant Consortium to come and lend us materials to run the booths and display their lunar rock samples. I co-chaired this event committee for eight years.
HESTEC Middle School Challenge
HESTEC Middle School Challenge
Also at the beginning of every year, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley hosts its annual HESTEC Week (Hispanic Engineering, Science, and Technology) which was the Science Club's 1st field trip of the year.
Next up, the STEM Club formed 1 to 2 teams to compete in the Science Olympiad middle school division. Science Olympiad is similar to UIL, except all the events are science, engineering, and math focused. Each team is comprised of up to 15 students and they compete in pairs. Teams practice after school every Tuesday and Thursday until 5:30pm from November to February.
Unfortunately, there are no Science Olympiad invitationals in our region. We traveled outside our region to Clute, Texas to compete in the Brazoswood High School Science Olympiad Invitational.
For six years, we competed at the Rio Grande Valley Science Olympiad Regionals which is held on the last Saturday of February. In 2015, we advanced to state and went on to compete at Texas A&M College Station.
Coding Club
Coding Club
Once Science Olympiad was done, we changed gears and focused on coding. Students were first introduced to coding during Hour of Code. Then we continued with our after-school schedule working through the voted upon module from Google CS First which teaches computer programming using Scratch.
Coding Jam
Coding Jam
La Feria ISD Coding Jam Coordinator
3D Printing with TinkerCAD
3D Printing with TinkerCAD
The STEM Club then finished the year learning how to create 3D designs using TinkerCAD and printing said design on one of the district's 3D printers.
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