C.H. CAMPBELL ELEMENTARY School brings back STEM week

May 9, 2014 at 12:04a.m.

By Robert Connelly

CANFIELD

C.H. Campbell Elementary School brought back STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) programming to students for the first time in two years.

Principal Travis Lavery said the school formerly used COSI programming, the Center of Science and Industry through the Columbus Science Museum, but that stopped a few years ago. This year, through the help of donated items and supplies as well as volunteers to work the stations, C.H. Campbell ran its own STEM week.

The week was broken up by kindergarten through fourth grade, each grade having its own day and each class having an hourlong session. Each session featured eight stations with seven groups rotating through at 8-minute intervals.

“So far, they’ve loved it. There are a couple [of] stations that might change a little next year because they are getting done early,” Lavery said about some of the stations.

During Thursday’s sessions for third-grade students, there were stations dealing with homemade lava lamps, a technology station showing the progress from wind-up record players to cassette players, and a cloud in a bottle, among other stations.

Bill Haas, a volunteer and engineer at Youngstown State University, was helping out with an Angry Birds station. This table featured a team using a homemade catapult, a PVC-pipe contraption using a bungee cord and a lacrosse stick. Another team constructed boxes in a formation, trying to defend boxes with an Angry Birds logo displayed on the front.

Haas said there were events such as this when he was in school at Canfield, but that this will hopefully attract more students to the STEM fields.

“It definitely is not going to hurt. We’ve definitely got to do something to get them more engaged,” Haas said. “If they don’t learn it from this, I don’t know what will.”

John DiRenzo has been a teacher with Canfield for 18 years, and he said the stations tied into what students are doing in the classroom. The cloud-in-a-bottle table tied into state-of-matter discussions in class, and a math game helped with multiplication.

“You can read about it in a book ... but to be hands-on, they love it,” DiRenzo said.