Full STEAM Ahead: A look at Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math learning in San Diego

Full STEAM Ahead: A look at Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math learning in San Diego

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students are learning skills for jobs that don't even exist yet maybe a kid's more artistic and they haven't thought of themselves as a scientist the most fun part when the competitions and see what problems we can solve that's our ultimate goal as educators to get them excited about learning i think it's just all super cool sometimes all they need is just someone to back them up some confidence someone to support them and tell them that they can do it welcome to this news 8 special innovate 8 full steam ahead i'm stella escavido i'm eric connor cbs 8 and uc san diego teamed up to start innovate 8 a project to help diverse students with steam learning and over the years innovate eight has inspired thousands of kindergarten through 12th grade students in our community through outreach and education steam is at the very core of every child's education it stands for science technology engineering arts and math and eric and i recently got a closer look at a during a field trip we took to pride academy in santee [Music] here we are at pride academy in santee we're here with principal kristen bonzer thanks so much for having us out here on campus yeah thank you for coming today yeah what a beautiful campus this is k through 8. tell us the importance of art in school art is incredibly important for all of our students it really allows all of our kids to shine and explore all sorts of things through content it also allows them to express their emotions and it's a great way to build community we know it's so important to you that you wanted to do more here right and that's why you got in touch with art reach i really wanted to connect with them to bring an art project and mural to our school when you look at this piece of art it is so beautiful it is so colorful what does it mean to you in your school to have this and is this going to be up for a short time a long time and we hope it's going to be up forever it really brings a ray of light and sunshine to pride academy and we've got hannah gundrum here this morning with the artreach mural program hannah this is so beautiful what is behind all of this it's incredible design there's a lot of work that went into this you can tell the artreach mural program helps students in schools to learn about murals their power their value and help to design and actually install murals on their campus [Music] i worked on like this corner right here this is what i painted and i really enjoyed this one because our school mascot is a panther and i thought it was really cool that we had our own addition to it we've got some cacti here to represent santee with the hills in the background we've got the paintbrush a lot of the mural participants really find art as a creative outlet one of the things that i think is so powerful is a lot of times schools are just painted like gray brown and there's no color and there's no vibrancy so this mural kind of invites students to come into the classroom to learn and welcome them into campus in a way that feels more exciting for them you're here to spice it up aren't you exactly what are some of the impact the kids tell you after they accomplish a really cool project like this this was just a huge project for the students because they had been doing distance learning for so long and had been isolated from their peers so it was a really cool way to have in-person programming for students so that they could really connect with each other in a safe way and leave a lasting mark on their school there are now two murals here and they want you back for more yeah exactly it gives us a sense of community for our school we kind of legacy behind since we're going to high school next year their school is collecting color [Applause] [Music] and that was so much fun isn't that fun yeah artreach was launched in 2007 right now they have eight local full-time artists it's funded through grants donations and scholarships right now artreach is bringing their incredible work to 37 schools around san diego county both in the classroom along with the mural program the late sally ride reached for the stars and wanted to inspire kids to find new frontiers themselves through science and education that is the heart of the program run by a uc san diego extension that bears her name news 8's carla cicchetto shows us how sally ride science is celebrating its 20th anniversary and a year of unexpected growth sally ride was legendary the first american woman in space and a professor of physics at uc san diego and sally really is still our north star she continues to guide us sally ride science has educated thousands of students over the last 20 years offering workshops to grades three through 12. the lessons are diverse and as a matter of principle so are the students many coming from underserved communities everything is grounded in equity diversity and inclusion that was the whole basis of this we wanted to make sure that it was not science that was isolated in la jolla that we could expand throughout the greater community and beyond the vast majority of courses were in person and hands-on with kids from the san diego region held during the summer the last summer that we were able to offer them here at our campus we had about 900 young scholars and parents come but that changed in 2020 just like the rest of the world the pandemic shut schools down and sent kids home sally ride science just saw that as a new frontier to conquer so they reached out online and they discovered new ways to inspire kids to learn and to explore as a result of putting our work online we've been able to attract scholars from over 13 countries especially those who may not have been able to access the sally ride science curriculum so in you know a very dark cloud there is a silver lining and then you take your hammer and you just kind of the move online is a smashing success have at it and you'll feel it break lois peterson has taught here for about seven years this gemology class is online but it sends kids out into the world i'm giving them the tools and the background knowledge and then i have them take it from there the classes are primarily in stem areas but with a lot of creative twists like coming up with a shelter to survive a massive asteroid hitting earth maybe a kid's more artistic and they haven't thought of themselves as a scientist but they can make something you know and in the guise of making something we can talk about the science that is surrounding that and tie those two things in together and maybe some of the young students will see their own future in science just like sally's crystallize right in front of them that's our ultimate goal as educators to get them excited about learning carlo chichetto news 8. i want to see it click in their brain isn't it absolutely coming up we're meeting a standout local teacher who's been featured on a cbs show and they are blazing a trail the san diego women in steam who were recently immortalized in a new exhibit [Music] you know a great teacher can be the key to a student's success helping them unlock their potential an award-winning san diego teacher has been featured on a cbs tv show news 8's ariana cohen sat down with pet peeves peace says she became fascinated by stem learning because of her dad and now she wants to inspire other young students pet peeves has been teaching at wilson middle school for 15 years she won the 2015 san diego county teacher of the year award and it's all thanks to teachers like pet peeves an award-winning instructor and robotics club coach i get to play with all these fun toys i get to tinker i get to be creative she was recently featured on mission unstoppable in this next segment we check out real-life robo competitors let's take a look a show that highlights female innovators on the cutting edge of stem which stands for science technology engineering and math uh it was you know and you know how the feeling you get like when you hear your voice for the first time you're years like wait that there's kind of this disconnect so to see myself and to know that other people are going to see myself it was just like this cognitive dissonance for me it was just like wait is that me pease says one of her initiatives is to encourage girls to pursue stem careers this can include becoming a zoologist engineer astronaut or oceanographer and the neat thing about stem education is that the students are learning skills that they're going to use for jobs that don't even exist yet the most fun part is figuring out strategies to win the competitions and see what problems we can solve gosh there's so many things that we do in my class because i do like coding and we do like laser cutting 3d printing robotics it's all i think it's just all super cool pease has hopes to inspire all students and teach more potential stem superstars but i feel really proud to represent my community peace says children and families need to advocate for stem learning in order to bring it into more schools she says you can simply do this by talking to faculty at schools and just spreading the word hey maybe you're the next stem superstar i'm ariana cohen for news 8. a new exhibit in texas is celebrating women in science across the country and it features five san diego scientists each one has their very own life-size statue placed at a dallas mall the goal is to inspire young girls to get into science and engineering news 8's heather hope has the story well it's certainly not every day that you get the phone call of getting a statue made in your likeness well rocket scientist jasmine sattler did and now her statue along with over 120 other women in science are on display it took several months to assemble 122 bright orange statues of real women across the country in science tech engineering or math careers it's my same height standing tall at 5'5 scientists and entrepreneur jasmine sattler enjoyed posing for her life-size statue kind of have a nice fun pose because i'm a dancing rocket scientist so i studied ballet and aerospace engineering jasmine along with five other san diego women have their own 3d printed statues placed at dallas's popular north park center mall in a new exhibit called if then she can it stands for if we support a woman in stem then she can change the world matthew cromet co-founder of the if-then initiative hopes these models serve as actual role models women from across the country who are authentic relatable contemporary stem professionals the statue for oceanographer amber sparks shows her kissing a fish but i can't wait to go to dallas and see it in person the uc san diego grad turned environmental consultant loves how her statue matches her hair it's electric orange so i was getting a lot of jokes from my friends and family the if-then exhibit is already inspiring little visitors taking pictures next to each statue give optics into those opportunities and hopefully inspire young girls to pursue careers in stem jasmine hopes the exposure breaks barriers for underrepresented women in science i left engineering after 10 years of being there just because not anything to do with my ability to do the job but engineering was the easy part the interactions with other people the discrimination the oppression was the really hard part of being there each statue a symbol for possibilities it's just like immortalizing all of us in history so that our legacy can live on and we can inspire so many other women in science the exhibit on display until october heather hope news 8.

so smart they're definitely an inspiration incredible incredible yeah do you want to see science in action yeah here's a look at just a few of the real world problems being solved by steam leaders from detecting coronavirus during the pandemic to helping injured wildlife to clean up ocean pollution and they've all been featured here on news 8. each year 14 million tons of trash end up in the ocean that's a trash truck load every minute so we want to introduce you to fred that stands for floating robot for eliminating debris a boom guides the debris to a porous conveyor belt capable of picking up micro plastics as small as five millimeters the makers of fred's are interns and volunteers students in high school and college and although these robots are still in the development stage the local non-profit clear blue sea hopes to send fleets of fred into the great pacific garbage patch to help clean up our act [Music] at ucsd they've gone high tech by using robots to track the spread of covet 19 on campus it's just not feasible to have everyone test every single day by collecting wastewater combined with rapid tests they can alert students and staff as to which buildings test positive that way arguments can self-test for covet 19 from one of the vending machines on campus the hope is to use technology to stop outbreaks before they start [Music] a turtle that lives at the birch aquarium is believed to be the only one of its kind in the world with a shell that was printed thanks to three-dimensional technology now similar 3d technology is being used to scan the loggerhead the turtle was rescued from a power plant in new jersey and they had to replace a piece of her shell known as a scoot specialists recently scanned her by using a structured blue light 3d scan that was overlaid with her ct scan from a few years ago all to check for changes and what they discovered the prosthetic still fits surrounded by some pretty cool technology aren't we it makes you feel proud right it is really neat to see if you want to learn more about these topics or watch these stories in their entirety you can head to our website cbs8.com our social media pages or our youtube channel and we are excited about what is coming up next two of our co-workers put science to the test at the fleet science center [Music] [Music] well it is one of the best places in san diego to play around and learn about science my kids apple absolutely love this place we sent news 8's neta ronpo and evan narani down to the fleet science center to test out an experiment and they had a blast take a look at what happened we're at the fleet science center today to show one of the many experiments that the fleet science center puts on related to liquid nitrogen yes this place is here to make all of us smarter learn about science and julia's joining us you are one of the many experts here and we have a really cool experiment that we're going to show you guys so we're going to take liquid nitrogen we're going to put it into our bottle it'll look really really cool um and you'll see all of these clouds kind of start to form we're going to take that put it into our big bin and we're going to probably get a very very large explosion here a little bit loud so you're going to fill that up you're going to tighten the bottle cap right yes and then i'll dump these balls on top yeah so you can see the clouds happening here so when it hits the ground too it disappears yes basically just evaporates because again it's boiling so quickly now you don't want to get any of this on your skin as it does that but yes it will just evaporate very very quickly um and that should be enough right there okay this is why we leave it to the pro there we go all right and then we step away and then we're gonna step away are we far enough away yeah we're good how about that nothing was damaged in the process everyone's here is okay yeah so tell us about what we kind of saw there so the liquid nitrogen again is turning from a liquid into a gas as it does that it expands about 700 times its original size so you can imagine now something that's like the size of a p is turning into something closer to the size of a baseball so it's expanding it's spinning expanding and since we you know closed off that top so tight um it just has nowhere else to go so then it just explodes this bottle and then in that process makes the the balls come up so that we can actually see it and it looks really fun thank you so much julie the fleet science center working wonders teaching us all kinds of new things that's right very exciting this is a good thing they stepped back but i love how they make it so fun and educational at the same time because that's the trick to getting kids to learn yeah no kidding that was fun to watch coming up from cooking to cosmetics how a hands-on after school program is making learning fun and sparking an interest in science at a young age [Music] at uc san diego students and staff are making their classrooms safer against cobin 19 by building do-it-yourself air filters out of boxes and fans check this out they're definitely thinking outside of the box with this project they're duct taping a fan to a box filtration device that will trap covet 19 particles they're very powerful and they work people don't know they're sick so they're not coughing they're not sneezing they don't have a temperature and they're producing aerosols which are like cigarette smoke volunteers made 250 of the box filters only one box is needed per small room the fan can be on the lowest setting and the filters will last up to six months to clear more than just covet particles they can also clear air pollution like we see during wildfire season an after school program at the fleet science center is going beyond typical activities tackling topics like the chemistry of cosmetics as news 8's tim blodgett explains this female-led program is designed to get young women interested in all things steam there's something shocking in today's workforce according to the u.s census bureau women are vastly underrepresented in the fields relating to science technology engineering and math also known as stem out of the entire labor force women only make up 27 of all stem jobs in america even when i was in college i knew two females who were in engineering and sometimes they were the only females in lecture halls for 500 300 students after graduating from ucsd ariana walker joined the team at the fleet science center and has made it her mission to get kids especially young women interested in all things stem this is scitec an after-school program devised by the fleet science center for girls grades four through six the classes give these young women a hands-on approach with interesting activities with the aim of inspiring the next young scientist or engineer food chemistry with like cooking and we do makeup chemistry chemistry of cosmetics technology type challenges to make them build like something that will turn on a light or power a motor in years past at the end of each class the fleet science center will put on a competition between schools in the district here is a competition from a few years ago where the girls had to design a rake to drop a lander on the surface of mars although the fleet science center encourages everybody to jump feet first into stem learning walker believes it's necessary to get girls involved at a young age teaching them that they can be the next generation of innovators i'm very proud of them like we get amazing amazing girls through there sometimes all they need is just someone to back them up some confidence someone to support them and tell them that they can do it and show them that they don't need to wait until after college or don't need to wait until a certain time in their life they can do it now they are capable they are smart tim blodgett news 8. impressive thank you for watching this news 8 special innovate 8 full steam ahead and stay tuned for more of these stories on news 8. and you can also

learn more about innovate aid or steam learning anytime by heading to our website cbs8.com as well as our social media platforms or our youtube channel thank you so much again for joining us

2021-10-16 07:32

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