“It’s fun because you get to play games,” said Loren Martinez, a fourth-grader who aspires to be a doctor when she grows up.
MOUNT VERNON – When Kenneth Hamilton took over the city school district as superintendent in August 2014, some of the first conversations he had with colleagues were about expanding students’ access to STEM.
Matthew Wilbekin teaches ratios to fourth-grade students at the Northeast STEM Starter Academy (NSSA), an extracurricular STEM education program. Tania Savayan/The Journal News
“As educators, the challenges that we face is that we have to prepare children for a world that we don’t even know, for jobs that are yet to even exist,” Hamilton said.
It was this thinking that helped launch a robotics, STEM-driven after-school program — which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics — for a cohort of fourth-graders in Mount Vernon earlier this school year.
“This particular program is unique because it starts early; previous programs were middle-school-level,” Hamilton said. “This is a very early exposure, so it increases the likelihood of having the skill set they need to specialize and make choices about the kinds of things they want to do.”
The program is run through the Northeast STEM Starter Academy, a Mount Vernon-based nonprofit created in 2013 to help supplement the city’s public school system with learning opportunities beyond the normal class day.
Funded this year with a $10,000 grant from the Westchester County Youth Bureau, the academy teaches 25 fourth-graders math, science and robotics on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, respectively. The hope for the program is to retain the 25-student cohort every year until they graduate high school.
Fourth-grade students collect data during a lesson on ratios at the Northeast STEM Starter Academy. Tania Savayan/The Journal News
Loren Martinez, 9, is a student at the Lincoln School and said she has enjoyed the extra learning time because she likes math.
On a recent Tuesday, the class was learning about ratios and collecting data by observing peers throwing a ball into a hoop a short distance away.
“It’s fun because you get to play games,” said Martinez, who aspires to be a doctor when she grows up.
That kind of reaction is exactly what Gerald Dennis, executive director of the academy organization, said keeps students coming back.
“The objective is to really build a longitudinal study that speaks to outcome-driven changes that we can support by having them more engaged, more knowledgeable and more involved in things of the STEM nature,” he said.
Fourth-grade students attend the Northeast STEM Starter Academy. Tania Savayan/The Journal News
“This stuff they’re learning now, that’s mundane, but then they say, ‘OK, I’m good at math, I can code my own program through my own computer and be a scientist,’” he said. “That’s how the excitement generates and the kids love it.”
