BPHS STEAM INITIATIVES INSPIRE HONDURAN STUDENTS
ethel Park
BETHEL PARK SCHOOL DISTRICT
Honduran students planted the garden they designed at the Summer Eco-Seminar at Los Olingos.
BPHS STEAM INITIATIVES INSPIRE HONDURAN STUDENTS
For the past two school years, students in Jason Mickey’ s Environmental Science class at Bethel Park High School have been partnering with students from the El Merendon School in Honduras on some hands-on STEAM activities.
The first year of the project entailed both groups of students conducting soil studies around their schools. They shared their findings with one another via a Skype session that was translated by BPHS AP Spanish students, because the Honduran students did not speak English very well. The study was especially important to the Honduran students, because their school is located in a coffee growing region and many of them will work in the coffee industry after graduating from school. Understanding the chemical composition of the soil is valuable to ensure the success of the coffee growing industry in their country.
The second year of the partnership with the Honduran students involved a study of streams and the collecting samples of macroinvertebrates, aka bugs, which live in the streams, in order to evaluate the water quality and overall health of the local stream. BPHS sent the Honduran students a book and collection equipment for the experiment. In addition to the Skype sessions, the students from Honduras sent photos to the BPHS students of organisms they were not able to identify. This school year’ s project will build upon last year’ s stream analysis experiment to include more statistical analysis and comparison with the Honduran data.
BPHS Environmental Science Students collected macroinvertebrate samples from local streams to analyze in the classroom.
58 Bethel Park
BPHS Environmental Science Students analyzed what they collected from local streams.
Bethel Park High School was paired with the Honduran students thanks to Neil Armstrong Middle School Introduction to Foreign Languages Teacher Maria Leonard, who is a native Honduran. In addition to her teaching at NAMS, Mrs. Leonard and NAMS Fifth Grade Teacher Kristen Rylander are the co-founders of the Coffee Arabica Foundation for Education, which uses the proceeds from the sale of Honduran Coffee from the Merendon Region to provide scholarship money for Honduran students to stay in school beginning with the seventh grade. In Bethel Park, the coffee is sold at Neil Armstrong Middle School, Independence Middle School and at Bethel Park High School in the studentoperated Bean and Berry shop, which raises money for BPHS students to attend DECA competitions.
Mrs. Leonard was recently contacted by Anwyn Darrow, a student at the University of Vermont, who has spent considerable time in Honduras and was intrigued by the work of the Coffee Arabica Foundation. She wanted to get more involved with the Honduran students, so she traveled to Honduras this past summer to meet Mrs. Leonard and work with a group of 15 of the Merendon students at a four-day eco-seminar that was held at Los Olingos, an eco-resort located on the ocean, two hours away from the mountainous Merendon region.
During the four days at Los Olingos, the students were able to learn about agriculture and eco-tourism, and they designed and planted an organic garden at Los Olingos. The vast majority of the Honduran students had never ventured far from their home, so it was a great learning experience for the students, who planted many plants they had never seen or knew about. Many of them also swam in the ocean for the first time. The data testing skills they learned by working with the Bethel Park High School students and the equipment and materials they received from the High School enabled them to fully participate in the summer seminar.
This project would not have been possible without the partnership with Bethel Park High School and its commitment to providing students with hands-on STEAM experiences.
Mr. Mickey’ s students are looking forward to continuing this valuable partnership with our Honduran friends in 2017-2018 as it is not only a valuable learning experience for the science students, but it is also valuable in terms of cultural exchange.