For my senior Capstone project, I did a series of STEM-based arts & crafts projects/activities with elementary school students that ran from April 22nd to May 6th. These activities included making paper airplanes, making paper and straw rockets, creating oobleck from scratch, and building towers out of straws and tape, all while learning the science, engineering, and physics behind them.

I worked with both Francis Scott Key Elementary School, the school I went to from K-6, and Sunrise of Philadelphia, the afterschool program that I coordinated with and where I held my activities. But truly, the biggest stars of my entire project and the reason why I did it was the students, who were always so full of energy, creativity, and a willingness to learn and start the activity at hand.

Overall, it truly just warmed my heart and filled me with an immense sense of fulfillment having been able to work with such creative children and having been able to see their process of working through things, being curious, asking questions, and coming to a conclusion at the end of the day. It’s like seeing a mirror of my past self, when I was first introduced to STEM and all these fun challenges, and this is also my biggest hope and accomplishment – that these kids found this just as memorable as I did when I was in their shoes.