STEAM Saturdays Around Bucks County

The Bucks IU was pleased to part­ner with two school dis­tricts this spring to expand the STEAM Saturdays program.

STEAM Saturdays is designed to engage stu­dents in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math. The goal is to inspire and encour­age inter­est with­in our future gen­er­a­tions in STEAM relat­ed skills and occu­pa­tions by devel­op­ing their 21st cen­tu­ry skills such as advanced prob­lem solv­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion and team­work, cre­ativ­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion, and crit­i­cal thinking.

On March 27, the Pennridge School District held a cod­ing and robot­ics ses­sion for 125 stu­dents in grades 1–5. One first grade stu­dent shared, “I loved that I got to have extra time to do dif­fer­ent chal­lenges and pro­gram my Ozobot. I tried one thing, tried anoth­er thing. And I got to work with dif­fer­ent kids. It was FUN!”

On April 27 and May 11, the Central Bucks School District host­ed ses­sions of STEAM Saturdays for 350 stu­dents in grades 1–8. Students were engaged in build­ing cat­a­pults, engi­neer­ing chal­lenges, and cod­ing with Ozobot and Sphero robots. The feed­back from stu­dents and staff was over­whelm­ing­ly positive!