STEM Youth club at Spartans Academy
Building on the success of STEM Youth Club in 2022, Spartans started 2023 with fresh ideas, incentives and some new volunteers ?
STEM youth club started in Summer 2022 following Spartans in-schools STEM support through the Sphero project. Sphero is programmable robot technology where young people learn about coding, engineering, maths and science. It’s been a great success and more and more young people were asking where they could do more. So Spartans set up the STEM club so that young people from different schools could come together and share their passion for STEM. They run the club through the youth work department, building a bridge of trust with participants and creating a safe space that welcomes and supports everyone.
‘Overall we are noticing that XXX’s whole attitude to all aspects of his life are improving, he is not scared to take on new challenges and he is learning that making a mistake in something is not failure but another opportunity to learn. We are so grateful to the whole team at STEM.’
At Spartans we have been reviewing, learning and developing as we go – our young people are full of great ideas and feedback. This term we’re choosing weekly themes linked to worldwide events. So far, we’ve had National Wordsearch Day, Burns Day and National Lego Day. We get to research on each theme and come up with activities and challenges for STEM club. This has proved to be a massive hit for all of us!
Spartans have also been delighted to invite some special guests to the STEM Club. Earlier this year they had Luci and Liam from Tinderbox visit them and deliver a super cool workshop on Game Creation. The young people had to create characters, settings and form objectives in order to create a successful online game. There was lots of excitement throughout the workshop and we can’t wait to see the finished game over the next few weeks.
As the club has expanded, so has the STEM team. Summer has joined us as part of the North Edinburgh Youth Work Academy trainee programme we’ve also had volunteer Lucy join us to gain experience of STEM in a Youth Work setting. We’ve loved having some new faces helping out at the club – thank you!
