Project Description

On Wednesday, November 8th, COA celebrated National STEM Day with a STEM Exploration event at our Goldin Center (2320 W. Burleigh Street). National STEM Day is a holiday that encourages youth to explore their passions for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. 90 youth from our pre-teen and teen programs attended COA’s STEM Exploration event, where they participated in exciting STEM activities and learned about STEM career fields. Throughout the two hour event youth from Auer Avenue School, COA Riverwest Center, and COA Goldin Center got to learn Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math skills at 12 interactive STEM exploration stations.

At each exploration station, youth participants used everyday items to perform creative scientific experiments. To learn about meteorology, youth used shaving cream to create rain clouds. In a highly interactive evolutionary biology lesson, youth used tweezers to simulate “good” and “bad” bird beaks and learn about natural selection. Youth also learned to think like engineers through a hands-on Lego building activity. In order to learn about binary coding, youth used beads and strings to create sequenced necklaces. At another exploration station, youth became mini-paleontologists, using toothpicks to dig chocolate chip “fossils” out of cookies. Actively engaged youth teams also used bubbles to learn about the properties of chemistry.

COA’s STEM Coordinator Lina Nguyen said “This was an engaging, interactive, and hands-on event that brought my vision for the Kohl’s Explore Your Future STEM Program to life. I could see that the kids were totally engaged as they participated in each station. It was great to see youth applying what they learned in our STEM lessons to their everyday lives, and to see them realize that STEM could be fun.”

The STEM Showcase was part of the brand-new Kohl’s Explore Your Future STEM program at COA, which aims to provide high-quality scientific education and career exploration to over 550 children in the first year alone. This program is a vital new addition to the agency’s year-round youth development programming and is offered at seven sites, including the Riverwest Center, Goldin Center, Hopkins-Lloyd Community School CLC (Community Learning Center), Auer Avenue CLC, O.W. Holmes CLC, Anne F. Doerfler School CLC, and Westside Academy CLC.

To view more photos from the event, click here!