S.T.E.M

STEM courses allow students to develop skills that make them more employable and ready to meet the demands of the current job market. Teachers will employ high-yield strategies that focus on experiential, inquiry-based learning, and innovation which will foster a variety of skill sets that emphasize creativity within the 21st-century job market. STEM courses center on the disciplines of Geography, Science, Math, and Robotics. The integration of these four subjects in the STEM program creates a cohesive, interdisciplinary, and project-based learning approach. At Villanova, students will have exclusive opportunities to enrich their learning. For example, STEM students have been involved in projects such as building a solar house where the STEM Science classes wire the solar panels, the Technology students build the structure itself, and the Math classes study the amount of energy saved by using the solar panels. Students have also engaged in cooperative projects with community organizations such as ERCA; students in the STEM Geography class made birdhouses for endangered birds to help revive the species. Another crossover activity between our Science and Math classes has been the creation of a pollination garden for improving the local bee population. Math classes developed statistics about how effective the garden was in protecting the bee population, while the Geography classes studied the effect on the environment. For course descriptions for each of the Grade 9 STEM courses (Math, Science, Geography, Technology), please see the page containing subject specific course descriptions.