Exploring, experimenting and having a ton of fun add up to a great way to learn about science, technology, engineering and math in STEM Scouts.
A pilot program of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), it is going into its fifth season. Dave McKeehan helped the Catalina Council bring the program to Southern Arizona and has been leading the STEM Scouts effort here ever since.
The program is organized into labs, which run as afterschool or evening programs. Labs are held throughout Southern Arizona—Benson, Oro Valley, Tucson and several schools in Vail, including Ocotillo Ridge, Senita Valley and Cottonwood Elementary schools and Old Vail Middle school. Participants get 26 weeks of hands-on labs, which are new each year and run by the STEM Scouts lab leader.
In 2015, Mazzy Carls (then a fourth-grader) was one of the original five STEM Scouts at Ocotillo Ridge. Now that school has two labs totaling more than 50 students. The big news is Mazzy just won her school science fair at Old Vail Middle School and her science board will be part of the SARSEF regional fair in March.
The bad effects of computer and TV screens interested her. But to simplify things, she decided to use plants as subjects instead of people. There would be three pots with five freshly germinated marigold plants in each. She exposed one pot to the blue light, one to the light of an LED and the third to sunlight.
“The light that comes off of your computer screens, yes it is colored, but it’s made up of the shorter, more energized parts of the visible light spectrum, which are the blues and the violets,” Mazzy points out. “My hypothesis was that the blue light would make the plants grow faster,” Mazzi shares. After a month or measuring and observing, she ended up rejecting her hypothesis. “They started dying andshriveling…the ones in the blue light just didn’t work out at all.”
Mazzy’s current science teacher Lisa Scott is also the Lab Leader at Old Vail. She points out that more women are needed in STEM. When Mazzy’s schedule lightens, she would love to be in STEM Scouts again. “STEM Scoutsreally touches upon all bits of science,” she says.
