STEM group teaches area kids about science, careers
Jan. 21—Scientist and engineer Jerome McQueen asked a group of kids Saturday at the Wiggins Community Center what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Little hands flew up with answers like professional baseball players and Youtube gamers. McQueen posed a new question: "How many of you want to be engineers?"
No hands were raised, but this is why McQueen said he does what he does.
"My company is introducing science and engineering to grade-school kids to try to get them to choose STEM as career aspirations," said McQueen, who is the founder of AcaSTEMics — a company that provides children with academic learning kits in the subject of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
With McWane Inc., a Birmingham-based industrial corporation, sponsoring the event at the Anniston community center, each child in the camp received a kit McQueen called a "magic lamp." Using the kit helped teach a child the basic principles of closed loop electrical circuits and the possible careers that make use of those principles.
"As a scientist and engineer myself, it just blows my mind just seeing what they come up with. That's why I try to motivate them to start thinking," McQueen said.
McQueen said there was a two-million-job deficit in STEM fields in America, and it was his goal to help close that gap. He said he chose Anniston specifically as he saw a need in "impoverished and minority neighborhoods to get them more involved in STEM."
Wiggins Community Center director Carol Bush echoed McQueen's statement in wanting to get kids more involved with the sciences to bolster their futures.
"I'm always excited to promote children," Bush said. "That's all I've done all my life."
Bush said that she feels there is a "dire need" for children to understand everything that is available to them. Her goal is to teach the kids to invest in themselves.
The community center was filled with kids of ages preschool to 11th grade working on their light projects. Zylen Davis, 9, sat working on his, periodically asking questions from a staff member, Joycelyn Palmore-Haynes.
"They're excited and they're going to be even more excited when they assemble their lamp whether it works or not. If it works, not only is the lamp coming on but the light inside them in their mind is coming on, that 'I really did this,'" Bush said.
Asked if this was the first time AcaSTEMics hosted the event at the community center, Bush said they had a trial run in her summer day camp last year which had tremendous results. The staff had prepared for 30 children to attend the camp, and once filling those 30 seats, she saw that she had over 30 more on the waitlist.
"That kind of sparked our attention to say, 'Wow, 30, and then another 36 on a waiting list who never got into the class.' We thought, 'OK, we need to do this again, and we need to up the numbers so that we can serve more kids,'" Bush said.
Staff Writer Ashley Morrison: 256-236-1551. On Twitter: @AshMorrison1105.
