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Bethel Park High School receives STEAM grant

By Cara Hostfor The Almanacwriter@thealmanc.Net 3 min read
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It’s getting harder to tell if students at Bethel Park High School are in science class, art class or something else entirely.

High school teachers are working together to blur the lines between school subjects as part of the STEAM initiative, which stands for science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. The educators collaborate and come up with projects that will encourage students to use skills from many different areas.

“We want to see our students become curious, connected thinkers, designers and makers,” said English teacher Charles Youngs.

The district received a $20,000 grant from Allegheny Intermediate Unit’s Center for Creativity that will be used to make four studios at the high school. The school already has one studio, dubbed Makers Hall, which is a larger room that can accommodate two or more classes and whatever equipment they may need. Bethel Park uses Makers Hall as a space for students to work on engineering, computer science and fine arts projects. The school also wants to set aside space for video conferencing and presentations, physical sciences and math, and brainstorming and research.

“The things (these teachers) are doing are things that I dreamed about doing when I started in education,” said Nancy Aloi Rose, Bethel Park superintendent. “This is just a tremendous time to be in education.”

The STEAM projects that students have tackled this year have run the gamut. Consumer science students created new recipes for hummus; marketing students found ways to advertise and price the products and finally, art students designed the packages and food labels.

Foreign languages teacher Maria Leonard will explore many different ways her students can collaborate with students 1,800 miles away, in her native Honduras. For several years, Leonard has nurtured a relationship between Bethel Park and a school in the central American country, exposing students in both countries to each other’s languages and cultures.

Teachers also want to start a project on neon lighting, in which students will use chemistry to create different colors and art skills to design the pieces.

Art teacher Kent Wallisch recently lead another project that combines art and science. Students experimented with rust — trying to determine which metals rust quickly and how different substances change the process. They later used that knowledge to create rust portraits by spraying a salt water solution on a metal sheet.

The new initiative is very exciting, but it also carries a risk of failure, since some projects will not turn out as well as students hoped, Wallisch said.

“But when we fail, it’s still just as fun, because we figure out why we failed,” Wallisch said.

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