Foxboro Students To Attend First Tri-Town STEM Expo

A few weeks after most of Wheaton College's student population heads home for summer break, the Norton, Mass. campus will be bustling once again when more than 800 middle schoolers from the towns of Norton, Mansfield and Foxborough arrive for the first Tri-Town STEM Expo.

The June 5 event will feature workshops, exhibitions and a keynote talk by Scott Lynde, IT program manager at Raytheon Co., all centered on the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

“The goal of the expo is to expose students to various STEM areas and pathways and to make them more college and career ready,” explained Tanya Benoit, Norton Public Schools’ science academic coordinator for grades 6-12.

Benoit and representatives from Mansfield and Foxborough schools were inspired to develop a local STEM expo after they attended a similar event in 2012. Once they laid the groundwork for the project, organizers began looking for a place to host the event and reached out to Wheaton College, a fellow member of the Southeastern Massachusetts STEM Network.

“We thought it was a great opportunity for Wheaton to support public school initiatives and also to help build a population of people who are interested in STEM,” said Professor of Education Vicki Bartolini, the college's Dorothy Reed Williams Faculty Chair in the Social Sciences.

With Provost Linda Eisenmann on board and Director of Conference and Event Services Kristen Turcotte helping with logistics, Wheaton joined the effort.

The daylong event will bring fifth graders from Mansfield, sixth graders from Foxborough and seventh graders from Norton to the Wheaton campus, where they will participate in workshops such as a “whodunit” session showing students how science helps investigators solve real mysteries and a session in which students will build a water wheel to generate hydroelectric power.

Read more about the STEM Expo on the Wheaton website: http://wheatoncollege.edu/news/2014/05/21/summer-stem/.