Green Meadows science teacher Jessica Barrett presents details on the student trip to Boston.
Photo credit: Erin Dowding
WILBRAHAM — Students in the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District recently expanded their STEM knowledge by completing hands-on projects and attending the One8 Applied Student Learning Showcase in Boston with Project Lead The Way.
Project Lead The Way is a K-12 applied learning STEM curriculum, supported by the One8 Foundation, that specializes in engineering, computer science and biomedical science. The One8 Foundation is a philanthropic organization that helps to support hundreds of schools around the state with curriculum integration and educator training through its One8 Applied Learning Hub.
Jessica Barrett, a science teacher at Green Meadows School, shared details of the trip and the projects that students worked on in the School Committee meeting on May 28.
This is the district’s third year attending the showcase, which took place on May 8 at Boston’s “the TRACK at New Balance.” Thousands of students from fourth to 12th grade attend the event to showcase their STEM and applied learning projects to industry professionals, such as those in pharmaceutical or engineering companies around Massachusetts.
“They listen to the student’s entire presentations and they ask them follow up questions and really engaging questions of what they did,” Barrett said. “Students can then ask them questions and it’s really cool because when they’re going through their presentations, as they’re presenting to these industry professionals, you just watch their confidence grow in what they did and explaining it. You watch them explaining where they messed up and fix their mistake or where they had to change something.”
Students that attended the showcase this year created a water filtration system, which had them design a system to filter dirty water or salt water. Barret showcased three groups from Soule Road School and three groups from Green Meadows. They were picked based on a rubric system from an initial showcase at the schools.
Each group, besides one, decided to filter dirty water, with one group using an evaporation system and others used a sediment system.
Barrett said the group to filter salt water stumbled upon their solution accidentally which “truly showcased what science and engineering is because then they had to figure out why it worked and explain that.”
Student groups are set up in rows at the official showcase, surrounded by students from other schools around the state. Barrett said this setup created a community and opened the opportunity to see other projects and hear what the other students did.
She said that the students’ main favorite part of the entire trip was the bus ride, but their second favorite part was having the ability to walk around and see the projects by older students.
“Throughout the showcase, these students were the youngest of them,” Barrett said. “They got to go see what high school students and middle school students were doing, these projects that they came up with, and then they come back to me and they say ‘I can come back, I can do this again, I want to come back to this.’ It just really gets them excited for the future in all of STEM.”
Barrett said that she wishes she could bring every student because it’s hard to pick the three groups from each school, so the goal for next year is to get each student from the Project Lead The Way program to the showcase.
