UW Summer STEM Camp Comes to Chehalis

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While the Chehalis School Board met in the W.F. West commons Tuesday morning, one far more important decision was being made on the other side of the school: What is the best way to build a candy corn catapult out of craft material?

The University of Washington (UW) science, engineering, technology and math (STEM) camp came to the high school this week to bring a three-day program to all area students entering grades nine through 12.

W.F. West students made up 37 camp-goers and another 15 hailed from other schools including Napavine, Onalaska and Adna, according to high school science teacher Wendy Neal.

“(During the school year) we were split into groups and a lot of my friends were in the A group and I was in the B group,” said Aiden Roe, who is going into his sophomore year at W.F. West.

He said his favorite part of the camp was the teamwork, adding: “I haven't seen a lot of these people since before quarantine.”

The camp is split in two segments, with the college of engineering coming for the first two days and the college of medicine on the final day. For Monday and Tuesday, undergraduate students from a variety of STEM majors came to work with the kids.

On Monday, students were introduced to their engineering mission: build a “pumpkin launcher” to launch a candy corn pumpkin as far as possible. They were introduced to Tinkercad, a website used in robotics and engineering to map out designs before building them.

“They put us into groups of five, so we built our own catapults, and every 30 minutes they would tell us ‘stop building, draw a design of what you built and then show it to the people around you for feedback,’” Roe said.

Students built their launchers out of popsicle sticks, rubber bands, hot glue and one 3-D printed candy pumpkin-sized basket. Using materials like these allowed the design to be altered easily, and students can replicate their experiments at home.

“The design process is essentially the same as what a (college) student would do. They would take what we call Engineering 105 which is ‘engineering design.’ And so this is a pared-down version of what they would do over a quarter,” said Priscilla Yoon, the assistant director for pre-college outreach and recruitment at the UW School of Engineering.

Students spent sustained hours working on the pumpkin launcher before Tuesday, when they were met with the challenge of changing the design.

“What we’ve done basically is given them small changes at first and then hit them with something hard,” said Ratik Koka, a senior at UW earning a degree in geography with data science. “So that shows them it could be something simple but also could be something that you have to redesign the whole catapult for.”



Implementing changes to their designs prepares students for what they would have to go through as engineers in their chosen industries. Koka said exposure to this work in high school will be extremely valuable for the students.

“Sometimes clients do reach out and they’re like, ‘We now have to do it this way’ or ‘You have to use these materials,’ and so we’re getting (the students) just used to that idea. But we also introduce the changes because as they are doing their own projects, they’re going to find they want to add more capability, more functionality, more something. And this mimics that,” said Dei Caudle, instructional technician at UW, who facilitates the engineering program.

On Wednesday, students switched gears for a program by the UW School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), where they got a taste for an extremely relevant process.

Students in a “mock task force” analyzed health data to form their own recommendations to a theoretical government in a given country. According to IHME’s instructional designer Marilyn Brooks, these are processes used by health scientists and government officials to guide policy decisions.

“It’s relevant to everybody’s life with just how they live their life and how they try to stay healthy,” said Ava Meller, a W.F. West student going into her senior year.

Meller’s favorite subject in school is molecular genetics. In the upcoming school year, she will work with the scanning electron microscope.

“For my career I could see myself studying diseases,” she said. “Like, choosing what I study based on what I see and the impact I see of that disease.”

Learning through a mixture of silliness and seriousness created an atmosphere that instructors described as a consistently rising enthusiasm among students across the three days. Plus, the camp’s hours of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. gave students the opportunity to do in three days what would have taken two weeks during the school year, according to physics teacher Emily Jordan.

“I went to a very small school, I loved it, it was a good school. But we just did not have events like this, we didn’t have the tools or equipment that (students) have access to here, so it’s really cool that students are getting these opportunities and I’m excited to be a part of it,” Caudle said.

In the future, UW will seek to expand its off-campus outreach to increase access to STEM education for rural communities.

“We’re hoping that we can provide a lot more of these types of activities and exposure through our outreach programming this year,” Yoon said. “We’re actually already in potential talks of bringing more programming here to W.F. West throughout the school year and then hopefully bringing it to other schools in the state.”