Top Photo: CSO Shireen

by Arizona CSO Shireen

As the world increasingly relies on technology and innovation, the demand for STEAM careers has skyrocketed. From artificial intelligence to brain-computer interfaces, STEAM is crucial to a country’s economics, innovation, security, and competitiveness. Despite this increasing demand, millions of students worldwide lack access to STEAM education. Two out of three U.S. women say that they are not encouraged to pursue a career in STEAM and 48% of middle schoolers find it hard to see themselves as scientists. This is attributed to multiple reasons, including lack of hands-on learning experiences, equitable resources, and other biases.

This inspired me to begin Pathways to Potential, an initiative dedicated to making STEAM education accessible to all students irrespective of their socioeconomic status, ensuring they have the chance to explore science through hands-on experiments. With the inspiration to create opportunities for students to experiment and explore, I applied for an Avnet mini-grant, hoping to turn my idea into a reality. As one of the recipients of this grant, I had the opportunity to launch this initiative by creating STEAM kits, writing guides with the scientific procedure and topics, and conducting demonstrations at Title 1 schools.

Over the course of three months, I created over 60 kits, spanning experiments that cover a broad range of scientific topics from biology to engineering. Each kit had all of the necessary materials and a self-made guide which detailed the procedure and the science behind the experiment. I guided over 250 students in 2nd to 5th grade through different experiments.

This initiative had a long-lasting impact on the students. After each experiment, students would come up to me and tell me that this was their first time exploring STEAM, or that they would like to pursue a STEAM career in the future! One teacher said, “I believe that these science activities have become a core memory for a lot of our students. While doing the experiments some students were saying things like, ‘this is so cool’ and others were so into the activity that they became focused and determined to complete the tasks. I can tell the students were into the activities because of how engaged they were.”

Witnessing how much these kits impacted students and encouraged them to dream big has inspired me to expand this initiative to allow more underprivileged and underrepresented students have the chance to explore STEAM. I am planning to create free summer camps for students that explore a variety of STEAM topics over the course of a week. Furthermore, this initiative is being expanded to more Title 1 Schools across the entirety of Arizona to empower the next generation of innovators.

Every student deserves the chance to dream, believe, and achieve. By providing opportunities for all students to pursue STEAM, Pathways to Potential is not just teaching science, but it is fueling dreams and igniting futures!