A majority of schools around the world host science fairs for students to compete against each other. Every year we have a science fair at St.George’s School, but this year the science community at school decided to try a new event, titled “STEM Week” stem standing for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. The week was a brand new event for St.George’s, being hyped up at the weeks starting assembly. The STEM week started on Tuesday, February 20th, where students were challenged to create Ice cream with liquid nitrogen in the upper great hall. The process of creating Ice cream with liquid nitrogen

is quite simple, stirring together all your normal ice cream ingredients, and slowly pouring the liquid nitrogen into the pot. Next on the agenda was a popsicle stick bridge building competition, which lasted around thirty minutes. Ending the day of activities for STEM was a student presentation about artificial intelligence and machine learning. All of this was a great success for its first day. Day 2 rolls around, and this is where the topics began to get serious, and the attention span of some younger kids was definitely tested. The Vancouver Aquarium presented to the grades 8-10, for about 45 minutes. These long presentations can easily get the best of younger kids, and often times they start to get pretty antsy. On Thursday the STEM team hosted a paper airplane competition marking the planes on distance and time. It was hard to track down the leader of the STEM group, but I managed to catch Jerry Ding in an email conversation. I finally had the chance to ask a few questions about this new event at St. George’s.

I asked Jerry What was your biggest challenge while planning the week out? He replied, “ Coordinating the leadership team. Everyone has other responsibilities, so tasks tend to be delayed until last minute.” Jerry manages and leads the entire STEM team, and that is a huge responsibility considering the anticipation of the event. “Do you think the STEM week was a big success, and will it be returning for next year?” “I think the STEM week is a huge success considering that it is the first of its kind. However, there is definitely a lot of room for improvement both in terms of content and types of activities. It is definitely coming back next year; in fact, this is why I started it–I want this to become one of the Saints’ lasting traditions, like the Arts week.” Even if you aren’t in the STEM community at St. George’s I think we can all agree that having more community event and more learning opportunities is always a good thing. I asked Jerry why he thought STEM week was important, “I think this initiative is important not because of its name or special niche in the school community; rather, it’s because, if well-organized, it can provide students at Saints with inspiration. By this I mean a lot of us become interested in a certain field because of activities we do at school.” Jerry is excited for the future of STEM week and is hopeful for the future students as he said, “There might be a lot of talented future scientists or STEM-entrepreneurs in the school; an annual event centered around STEM will help these students discover their passion and talent. This is especially important at a time when our society’s development largely revolves around technological breakthroughs.”

In conclusion to the newly added STEM week, I and many others believe that it was a huge success for the new group, and will see a bright hopefully strong future at St. George’s.Expectantly, the STEM group will soon recruit more up and coming bright minds as this years leaders move on, and the STEM event should inspire younger grades to pursue sciences.