COLORADO SPRINGS — St. Paul Catholic (elementary and middle) School is challenging students to utilize critical thinking and ingenuity to take on real-world issues in their new STREAM program and innovation lab that will enter its second year after summer vacation wraps up.
The program, made possible through a state grant, aims to focus students on the aspects of science, technology, religion, engineering, art, and math all through a lens of technology.
"Our goal, our focus," said Terrie Wieland, the director of the STREAM/Innovation Lab at St. Paul Catholic school, "is critical thinking skills, problem-solving, creativity; we want them figuring things out."
The lab provides elementary and middle school students a chance to apply their creativity in combination with the varying aspects of their education in order to come up with unique solutions to problems large and small.
One recent project had students working to figure out how to build earthquake-safe structures, an exercise that naturally lead to trying to figure out additional ways to help those who experience natural disasters; this had students designing and coding miniature machines that were made to clear debris.
One student, Liam Stegmiller, even took the initiative to create a mobile proximity sensor that would allow the visually impaired to navigate buildings that had experienced major shifts due to an earthquake.
"It detects when you're near something," said Liam, "and it has a different frequency depending on how close."
The program has mostly wrapped up for the summer, having finished a summer camp in June, but will return (twice a week) in the new school year with new focuses, new challenges to overcome, and new ways to promote creativity and critical thinking.
"If our kids aren't well rounded; if they don't learn innovative thinking," said Wieland, "then our future doesn't hold a lot."
To learn more about St. Paul Catholic School, click here.
