NJIT's Second Elementary STEM Challenge Conquered by 30 Local Schools
Wise Wolves, a team of fifth-graders from Morristown's Unity Charter School, won this year's Elementary STEM Challenge at an awards ceremony in the Campus Center ballroom on Monday.
The event provides scientific and technical opportunities to students including girls, minorities, and underserved communities that may lack resources. It's organized by the NJIT Center for Pre-College Programs and began last year as a virtual conference, due to the COVID pandemic, moving back on campus this year.
"The Center has, for many years, held STEM competitions and challenges for middle and high school students. We believe that there is a need to expand them to upper elementary students. We’ve also observed that some teams, especially those composed of mostly girls and others from underserved and underrepresented groups, would have benefited from support before the day of the competition," explained Suzanne Berliner-Heyman, director of program operations and outreach.
Last year's event emphasized solar power, while students this year focused on wind power.
"Our fifth-graders … built a wind-powered vehicle that could travel 200 centimeters and hold weight," Wise Wolves teacher Kelly Fedynich said. "Today it held 215 grams. We just ran out of space for more weight, so it was really awesome."
Fedynich said this was her youngest team and she's proud of them for also winning the engineering logbook category. She also had students from a decade ago who are now engineering majors, showing that early STEM education works — "It makes me so happy. We were lucky that our principal let me put it in our science curriculum," she noted.
There were 30 teams in the competition with additional category prizes including best teamwork, device design, an engineering quiz game, most innovation design, oral presentation and sportsmanship.
Dani'el Scoon, 10, is an African-American student who said he enjoyed the experience and was thrilled to win a trophy for the first time. He used computer-aided design software to build his team's vehicle, with the results 3D-printed by the NJIT Makerspace which also printed the event trophies. In the competition, "I found that teamwork is a lot more important than just a little project in math class. I found that drag affects a car moving at a high rate," he said.
Scoon said he wants to become a nuclear engineer — "I think splitting atoms and finding new elements is pretty cool!"
Victoria Pirog, a first-year mechanical engineering major and Albert Dorman Honors College student from Clifton, volunteered as one of the student mentors. Her own mentor was her older sister, who is also an engineer.
Pirog said that teaching children about engineering notebooks was a healthy reminder to herself, as a new member of the university's Baja team. She was also pleased to work with minority girls who may not have the same opportunities as others. "Even though you might be one of the few girls in your group, that doesn't mean you can't contribute," she told them.
Berliner-Heyman, director of program operations and outreach, said the event went superbly and that her organization is applying for a National Science Foundation grant to perform a research study based on the participating students.
The event was appropriately held on the mathematically relevant Pi day, March 14, and brought hundreds of young minds to the otherwise empty campus on spring break.
