This content is made possible through TCR’s Student Voices series, made possible through our partnership with Truman College and the Uptown Exchange.
On any given Thursday afternoon in the cafeteria, one might smell tacos or gyros, accompanied by the silence of hungry students taking a meal break between classes. Yet those who grabbed a bite to eat on Thursday, Nov. 13, found the smells of formaldehyde and the noise of a buzzing drone, for the second annual STEAM Day celebration that ran from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., supported by the Center of Excellence in Scientific Technology and Innovation.
The event allowed students to engage hands-on with all the possibilities that science, technology, engineering, arts and math-related disciplines (STEAM) can offer. This year’s spectacle boasted 25 booths with 28 student-led activities representing various academic departments.
Certain tables applied scientific and mathematical language to practical concepts like probability’s relationship to shooting a basketball. Elsewhere, participants were invited to see the “colors” of specific elements using a spectrometer. For those with strong stomachs, there was the opportunity to hold a human brain or touch human lungs. Popular culture fans would be excited to discover the science of Star Wars and Harry Potter.
One spectator, Conor McBride, a first year Falcon pursuing nursing, was surprised how “every day, everything around us is STEAM oriented. From basketball shots to color theory, to lasers.” For McBride, what made the day enjoyable was how willing students were to explain to each other how each station worked. “They seemed genuinely interested in what they were presenting.”
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“Students present to students, in order to inspire other students, ” emphasized Dr. Anan Alkarmi, Truman’s Dean of Scientific Technology and Innovation, with a specialty in Biomedical Physics. He is also head of the campus Center of Excellence in Scientific Technology and Innovation, overseeing the departments of Biology, Mathematics, Physical Science, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering and Earth Science.
Alkarmi praises transfer success to four-year universities and celebrates how the STEAM curriculum promotes job-readiness. Industry partners are “willing to take our students, because they have experienced our students before. They have confidence that they have the required skills, and they are willing to hire our students immediately,” Dr. Alkarmi said.
But students are encouraged at Truman to be more than just “worker bees”, according to art professor Stephanie Roberts, whose drawing class presented compositions from a recent project that tasked students with rendering landscapes using unconventional colors alongside optical illusions that forced the observer to discern between perception and reality.
As Roberts puts it, “Noticing color shifts in an abstract painting is translatable to the subtle and complex information that a doctor needs to decipher in a patient.” She continues further, “These skills (critical, creative thinking) not only develop the whole person, but serve them well in the work place, and in their communities.”
