Introducing STEM to children in elementary school can have two major impacts on society today.
First it will help fill the growing pipeline of STEM jobs within our country so that these jobs are no longer outsourced. By the time students get to high school, many are preoccupied with required credits or other interests, making it difficult to capture their full attention to explore STEM fields. If you wait until high school to introduce STEM education, you’ve missed an opportunity to allow them to fully explore every facet of a potential career in STEM fields. If you plant the seed of opportunity in their minds early on, they have plenty of time to explore their options.
Secondly, it will give those who are underrepresented in STEM fields a fighting chance. It’s no secret that women and minorities are underrepresented in STEM fields. Encouraging all students to consider STEM careers at an early age will help girls and minorities better envision a future in STEM and create positive learning environments early on.
I’m seeing more and more school districts introduce STEM at an early age. For example, the Virginia Beach STEM Robotics Challenge has grown from a grassroots effort started by the Virginia Beach City Public Schools Office of Technical & Career Education (TCE) to a competition that thousands of students participate in. Students range in age from elementary to middle to high school, and many of these kids are so invested in the program that they spend their own personal time after school to work on their creations.
It’s not just public school systems exposing young children to STEM too. Slover Library in Norfolk, Virginia has a makerspace that routinely engages younger students in their makerspace, which boasts an audio/video recording studio and a textiles work area in addition to typical maker technologies like 3D printing and laser cutting.
Community colleges and universities offer tours and summer camps for increasingly younger students as well. BridgeValley Community & Technical College is a huge proponent of this in South Charleston, West Virginia. The school offers an annual day-camp, called STEAM Academy, where kids to spend a portion of their summer having fun “imagining and making.”
Putnam County High School in West Virginia also encourages exposure to STEM at an early age, offering tours of all its CTE programs to local middle school students so that they have a better idea of where their interests lie before they get to high school.
Some may argue that elementary students are too young to understand STEM concepts. As a parent myself, I used to be skeptical about my own children’s ability to engage in STEM learning when they were young, but they proved me wrong. When my youngest was in the 4th grade, his class completed a project in which they made their own heart rate monitors, programming and soldering mini Arduino microcontroller boards into pieces of wearable technology.
Not only did the students pick up on some of the key STEM learning concepts, but everyone completed their project successfully and presented their work to all the parents. Their proud sense of accomplishment was infectious and just goes to show how challenging students when they are young is key to drumming up STEM excitement well before their formative high school years.
