Lone Star College-CyFairand Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District students recently spent a day engaged in STEM stations related to catastrophic events, food chains, biometrics and more.
LSC-CyFair Professor Shamim Arastu’s EDUC 2301 class and Professor Aurora Lugo’s Honors ENVR 1402 class teamed up for a Service Learning Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) project with Anthony Middle School science students.
“I wanted to take STEM out into the community to expose children to learn and get excited about STEM,” said Arastu, who, along with officers from the college’s Future Professional Educators Club, have also been mentoring at Anthony for a year and a half.
The goal for LSC-CyFair’s students was to collaboratively engage them in creating lessons and experiments while learning the content for the course and to serve the community, said Arastu. It was also an opportunity for the Honors Environmental Science students to practice giving presentations while educating students on current environmental issues they learned during the semester, said Lugo.
The goal was for the Anthony students was to reinforce what they were learning but in a different way and to possibly spark an interest in future scientists. Perhaps the LSC-CyFair student-created lessons would also be used in future science classes.
College students, who received Service Learning credit for this project, spent the day with 7th-grade students performing specific experiments that align with their current science curriculum. Among the concepts covered were catastrophic events, organisms in diads, food chains and biometrics.
LSC-CyFair student Brittany McGlothlin said the whole experience opened her eyes to the possibility of teaching middle school. What surprised her was how knowledgeable the students were with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS material on the respiratory system, she said.
“They knew a good bit of the materials we went over and asked very good questions,” said McGlothlin. “This was my first time actually getting to teach a lesson and I loved it! One of the students passing through our group said, ‘These stations are very creative,’ which confirmed that the students were having fun and engaged in the lessons we were all teaching.”
This Service Learning Project was another example of LSC-CyFair’s longstanding partnership with Cy-Fair ISD, which is mutually beneficial to both educational institutions, said Dr. Claire Philips, Dean of Math, Sciences and Engineering.
Registration is open for summer sessions, which start June 4 and July 12 and for fall classes, which start Aug. 27. For information, go to LoneStar.edu/registration.