2016 STEM Outreach

Educational Engagement Summary

For this year, we have several STEM outreach events already planned. We have already participated in one STEM event this year, the Cambridge Science Festival’s Science on the Street event, where we helped run a booth showing children how to construct stomp rockets and paper kites. In the future, we plan to run the following events:

  1. STEM Field Trips for the Northeastern University Center for Stem Education: We will be running egg drop and catapult activities on November 18th and February 3rd, and we are currently in the preliminary stages of planning more activities for January 13th, February 17th, March 31st, and April 7th.
  2. NEPTUN: We will be running a seminar for the Northeastern Program for Teaching by Undergraduates. In total we will run four 2 hour long courses spread between October 22nd and 29th.
  3. Cambridge Science Festival: We will be running our own booth at the festival’s Science Carnival and hosting our own event at Northeastern as a part of the weeklong festival in April.
  4. MathMovesU: We will be participating in this day-long event for over 200 middle school-age Girl Scouts, in collaboration with engineers from Raytheon.
  5. Building Bridges: A biannual Center for Stem Education event for high school students, where they are introduced to the NEU College of Engineering, and participate in engineering activities run by Northeastern students and faculty. See Appendix A for our letter of support from the Center for STEM Education.

Evaluation Criteria for Activities

The event will be considered successful if:

  • Kids participate in STEM themed, team activities
  • Children get hands on experience trying to solve a problem by going through the scientific/engineering design process
  • Students learn a little about what our club is and why we love STEM so much, exposing them to what exciting possibilities STEM offers
  • Students learn something new (ex: basics of rocketry)
  • The kids have fun and enjoy the activity

We want to educate and get students interested in rockets. We plan to do this by showing students in what our club is about by showcasing our awesome past projects, teaching them about the basics of rocket science, and overall getting them excited about STEM!