STEM camp Winners MT062818_web
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Creativity abounds in STEAM Camp at James Hart School

The first District 153 STEAM Camp gave one student a chance to create replicas of Chicago’s downtown buildings, a team the opportunity to build a robot and another to produce a movie. It’s all part of STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts and math.

  Winners of the summer school STEM program contest
  are Kennedy Walker, left, and Khalis Muhammad
  for their wind turbine. The girls will start sixth
  grade in the fall.
(Photos by Marilyn Thomas/
  H-F Chronicle)
 

The first District 153 STEAM Camp gave one student a chance to create replicas of Chicago’s downtown buildings, a team the opportunity to build a robot and another to produce a movie. It’s all part of STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts and math.
 

  Jordan Berry, a seventh
  grader at James Hart
  School, built a replica of
  downtown Chicago’s
  buildings.

 

“It was a blast!” said Jack Keigher, who joined with two friends to build a solar oven. He reported “lots of good energy” abounded at the camp the last week of June.
 

James Hart School in Homewood has had a lab for two years and students have had great success creating and learning during the school year, said teacher Katie Nigro. Students spend six weeks on creative media arts (CMA) in the broadcast studio and six weeks on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) issues in the computer lab.
 
  The solar oven built by,
  from left, Timmy VanEtten,
  Jack Keigher and Parker
  Lomaeglio won third
  place honors.

 

Cheri Pesina, who directs the CMA side of the Smart Lab, and Nigro, the STEM lab facilitator, convinced the administration to host a summer program. They weren’t sure how it would go, but the 40 students in the session learned together on projects as varied as bridge building, robotics, animation and computer coding.
 

“We had some really creative projects, and we had kids helping each other even though it wasn’t work on their own projects,” Nigro said.
 
  Second place winners were
  Sommer Owens, left, and
  Tabitha Werner selected
  for their animation project.
  They are incoming sixth
  graders. 

 

The five-day camp gave students entering sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grades the chance to design projects that could win honors.

The first place winners were incoming sixth graders Kennedy Walker and Khalis Muhammad. Their first project — a Ferris wheel — collapsed the day of judging, but they were about to turn a loss into a win by converting their project into a wind turbine.
 

The eight judges agreed their efforts represented the true meaning of learning and discovery and applauded them for not giving up even when failure seemed eminent.
 
Second place honors went to incoming sixth graders Tabitha Werner and Sommer Owens, who produced an animated video.
 
Third place honors were shared by incoming seventh graders Isabella Woodward and Amy Ward, who built a robot, and the team of Timmy Van Etten, Jack Keigher and Parker Lomaeglio, who cooked hot dogs, pizza rolls and nachos on the solar oven they built using cardboard and aluminum foil.
  Third place winners were, from left, Isabella
  Woodward and Amy Ward who worked on a
  robot project, and Timmy VanEtten, Jack
  Weigher and Parker Lomaeglio who built
  a solar oven.

 

 

 
 

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