IN West Mifflin Summer 2016 | Page 26

STEM Program— Popular Summer Pick S tudents who are interested in science and technology can use the summer to prepare for West Mifflin Middle School’s enhanced STEM program. The middle school spent the last academic year adding projects and expanding course offerings related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The program will be expanded further next year, but middle school principal Brian Plitcha says the details are not yet finalized. Last year Marci Hunnell offered a digital media class to seventh grade students that included several robotics and computer coding projects that used the Scratch programming language. Hunnell says students who want to get an early start exploring Scratch can visit scratch.mit. edu over the summer. She also suggests students can create an account at code.org to start solving simple coding puzzles as well. Although West Mifflin Middle School does not offer any summer science or computer camps, several other institutions do, such as Carnegie Mellon University. 24 724.942.0940 TO ADVERTISE | West Mifflin West Mifflin’s enhanced STEM gives kids entering middle school a leg up on science. By Paul Glasser Offering students the chance to explore science and technology in middle school is important because it exposes children to new concepts they might not otherwise learn, Hunnell says. “If I had learned to do this when I was younger, I might have done something related to computers,” she says. “Programming is one of those things that is the way of the future, and there is a lot of demand for it in the job market.” Hunnell also teaches the Accelerated Curriculum Enrichment (ACE) program and gave students a chance to use Scratch to build and program robots. The students also employed devices called Makey Makeys, which are similar to motherboards, to control the robots. Students in the ACE class displayed their projects at a fair in April. One team built a harp and another created a piano using cardboard and foil. Both projects utilized Makey Makeys to produce musical notes and create an interactive experience. Although some students thought a programming project would be boring, most participants, as well as parents, enjoyed the fair, Hunnell says. “One dad said his kid was really into the robots and thought it was a good experience,” she recalled. West Mifflin Middle School has also updated the industrial arts curriculum to include more science and engineering topics. The classes were also extended from 12 weeks to 18 weeks. John Ohnhaus, a technology education instructor, used the extra time to teach seventh grade students how to build a solar-powered