Whitewater High is taking hands-on learning to their elementary school friends. Housed in a vehicle donated by the Board of Education, the STEAM Bus is a student-led project through the WHS STEM program. The bus brings a fun array of activities for students to experience, like green screen, robotics, VR, roller coasters, and rockets.
It is completely run and led by 9th and 10th grade STEM students in Scientific Research classes. They research and come up with lessons on their assigned activities and then facilitate them to the elementary students, with 11th and 12th graders chipping in on the weekends.
STEM coordinator Shelley Kozłowski hopes students take away three key things from the bus.
First, she hopes to instill a love of science, technology, engineering, and math at an early age.
“I loved that I heard one student say, ‘I want to join the STEM program when I get to high school!’”
Second, she aims to empower high school students to be a part of something bigger than themselves and see how they can make a difference in the love of learning for a child. Most importantly, she wants students to see learning can be fun.
The work also goes beyond just the hands-on experiments. They also have groups where they are assigned to promote and manage the STEM Bus, including Project Managers, Communications/Marketing team, Documentation/Pictures/Social Media, Design, Website, and Grants/Community outreach.
They have big visions for the future of the bus dating back to its start in 2018, and they need your help.
“We are still in the beginning stages of the STEAM Bus project, and we are still in need of lots of community support,” said Kozlowski. “We would love to see our bus painted or wrapped by our community soon so it stands out as a special bus rather than looking like a school bus.”
