STEM Club makes math and science fun

Geil Elementary School’s STEM Club is helping kids discover and fuel a passion for math, science, and technology.

STEM Club, which is exclusive to fourth and fifth grade students at Geil, is now in its fourth year of maxed out membership, a testament to the after-school program’s popularity among students. The club’s programming is run by 4-H educator Nathan Rice, who handles several educational programs in Scotts Bluff, Kimball and Banner counties.

“It’s actually the first program I ever did in my role,” said Rice. “They came to me and said they wanted to host a STEM Club, and since then we’ve done it every year.”

The club’s most recent meeting on Thursday, Jan. 26, was focused on the subject of thermodynamics, featuring activities that helped make the high-level material very accessible and interesting to kids.

“Today, we did a two-part experiment,” Rice explained. “The first part was that we had them develop a cup that would insulate their water.”

Using common household supplies like tin foil, bubble wrap, plastic wrap, and cotton balls, the students worked in pairs to construct a cup that they thought would keep water cold. Rice then filled the cups with water and let them sit for the rest of the meeting.

“Then we measured the temperatures to see which one insulated the best. But while we were waiting, we tried to calculate the energy that was lost out of dryer heat vents every year, and it turned out to be a really big number,” said Rice.

The students eagerly tackled some very complicated math during this second exercise. For example, they calculated that 90% of the approximately 131.2 million homes in the United States have dryers installed. Under the assumption that each of those households runs 1.5 loads of laundry per day, that figure resulted in 64.6 million loads of laundry per year. They then calculated how much energy was lost by expelling the residual heat out into the atmosphere, a staggeringly large number.

“The lesson was about heat transfer, about how heat is moved between molecules,” said Rice. “The purpose of doing the calculations was to show them that units are important, and also to show them that a lot of information is online. You can get a pretty good estimate of the physics and the science behind things by looking up information.”

Rice said that a STEM Club like Geil’s is important because it helps students develop a passion for the subject matter at a young age.

“It gives them a spark that helps them get past being scared of it and past thinking that it’s boring,” he said. “This is when people decide what they’re passionate about. If you can find a passion when you’re younger, it will most likely carry through the rest of your life.”

Fifth grade teacher Crystal Venable said there’s a visible difference between students’ reactions to STEM lessons in the classroom and during club time, a lot of which can be credited to Rice and the way he makes learning fun.

“We get to be way more hands-on here,” said Venable. “Mr. Rice brings an element of energy that encourages them to be hands-on, and he’s always saying, ‘We can do this, it’s OK.’”

Other subjects the STEM Club will tackle this year include computers, drones, hatching chicks, and rocketry, all of which will include lots of hands-on activities for the kids to get excited about.