New and Inspiring STEM Initiatives

In the past couple weeks, I’ve read about a lot of STEM initiatives in the news, but two in particular seemed worth sharing:
In Illinois, a collaboration between a University and a soon-to-be-built public school will give students a chance to get a top-notch STEM education. The John C. Dunham STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Academy at Aurora University will open for the 2014-15 school year, and is made possible by cooperation between the four school districts of Aurora, Illinois and Aurora University. The Academy will serve approximately 200 students from the four school districts and will be staffed by teachers drawn from the districts who will earn “content-based STEM master’s degrees during their residency in the school,” according to a press release. “They then will return to their home districts ready to serve as teacher-leaders and a new generation of professionals will take their places.”
In California, homeless minority girls are invited to spend a week at California State University Long Beach, where they get a taste of university life and fun hands-on engineering activities through a program called Engineering Girls – It Takes a Village. 30 elementary- and middle-school girls who live in transitional housing in Long Beach, along with their mothers, built rockets, underwater robots, bridges, and more. The girls are also mentored by students and teachers from the Long Beach Unified School District.