Robinson Barracks Elementary School
Robinson Barracks Elementary School held a STEM Day, Nov. 2. STEM stands for science, technology, math, and engineering and it is a focus of many schools across the nation.
“The day was geared towards creating excitement about all things STEM no matter the age,” said Janis Renninger, RBES Special Education teacher.
RBES turned the entire school into a hands-on STEM museum for the students as an end of the first quarter learning activity. Teachers, as well as special guest speakers from the 52d Strategic Signal Battalion and the U.S. Army Garrison Stuttgart Criminal Investigation Division provided learning activities ranging from creating bottle rockets, examining fingerprints, making glitter slime, testing surface tension, and the physics of making catapults and sound.
Students participated in 25 minute multi-age group sessions that rotated throughout the morning. Sgt. Joshua Golightly, CID, taught classes on many of the science-based strategies used by criminal investigators. This included the use of different types of light to help detect clues at a crime scene.
Cpt. Lucas Brown and Sgt. Alexandra Watson of 52d Strategic Signal Battalion instructed over 100 students on how to code in “Scratch,” a programming language for kids developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Students had the opportunity to develop their own running code and see what makes computer games work.