High School Students Learn Hands-On At STEM Fair

Robots, Northrop Grumman, NASA and AirTran were just a sample of the features at the STEM fair held Friday at Century High School – where hundreds of students explored career fields such as science (S), technology (T), engineering (E) and math (M).

“The STEM fair is an opportunity for students to partake in three different rotations of different experiences," said Daniel Rosewag, who runs the STEM Academy program at Century.

The fair activities, he said, ranged "from keynote speakers, to an application fair that has nothing but hands-on experiences, to a choice of career presentations."

Rosewag and the STEM Academy executive board have been planning for the event since August, organizing the students' top choices of career presenters they wanted to see, giving them itineraries of whom they were to visit, and filling the room with 33 top-notch speakers from various departments, organizations, corporations and schools.

“This has been, overwhelmingly, just a ton of work, but I think it went off without a hitch, and everyone seems to be having a good time,” Rosewag said during the event. 

The keynote speakers for the day were John Fagnant from Northrop Grumman, who has 20 years of experience as an officer in the United States Air Force, and Don Thomas, who is a director of the Hackerman Academy of Mathematics and Science and a former mission specialist on four space shuttle flights.

While students learned from the keynote speakers, many were also eager to try the hands-on portion of the day at the application fair. There, they could “tweak” instruments at a demonstration on repairing and building them, learn how a National Geographic television show is edited, get a grasp of the science behind fingerprinting, and more. 

The fair “is interesting – it has a lot of real life applications that we don’t get in the classroom every day,” said Austin Cole, a junior at Century, during the event. “And it presents people who don’t normally do scientific stuff with the opportunity to see what value it has in the world, and what they can get out of paying attention in class and working hard.”

Said Kendall Price, also a junior at Century: “I think it’s pretty cool. My particular favorite was the facts about the watershed and the Chesapeake Bay. I learned a lot of the importance of the environmental stuff.” 

Andrew Au, a mathematics and statistics professor at the University of Maryland University College, was one of the presenters at the STEM Fair. He came equipped with ping-pong tables, charts and posters to help students learn about physics.

“I’m a physicist, and my partner’s a biologist, and we joined together to try to explain the physics and biology of sports, especially like football and table tennis”  Au said. “What they’re doing here ... is actually practicing the physics of ping-pong.” 

Rosewag described the fair as something that fills a gap between the classroom and a particular career field.

Teachers are “not the ones in the field doing these applications every day,” he said. “This provides students the opportunity to hear from the best and the brightest of every STEM field and career path, and to hear what it’s all about and what they can do with it.”