STEAM Campers Create and Innovate

Funded in part by the Mellon Foundation, Center for Community Engagement, and private donations, the 2015 Lafayette STEAM camp— STEM plus the Arts—was held July 27 to July 30. Sixty Lehigh Valley intermediate students participated in hands-on activities culminating in a Final Showcase groups project. The theme Imagine, Innovate, Create revolved around design.

Camp leaders Matt Marlin ’16, film & media studies and English, and Monica Meng ’18, civil engineering, conceptualized and planned 12 learning modules and trained more than 30 volunteer Lafayette students as counselors and facilitators. Marlin and Meng worked under the direction of faculty advisers Art Kney, associate professor/department head of civil & environmental engineering, and Christian Tatu, who coordinates the College writing program.

Improving education in science, technology, engineering, and math is also a passion of President Obama, who launched the Educate to Innovate campaign—a coalition of government agencies, corporations, universities, and philanthropies—to enable more under-represented students to excel in STEM subjects.