Last Thursday, the team received the amazing opportunity to present to Congressman Joe Kennedy. Congressman Kennedy has been visiting schools across the state of Massachusetts to survey the STEM programs being implemented. Within our school, our class was one of the few selected to present to him.
The students began writing and practicing their presentation Tuesday after school. Thursday morning, Major 3 students, Sollie and Sam, set up the room for the presentation. Shortly afterwards, the Congressman arrived.
Karen began by giving Congressman Kennedy an overview of our experience working on the InvenTeam project. Paroma talked about our connection with St. Joseph School and our plans to raise money this year to continue our efforts in Ethiopia. Lauren discussed the design team’s newest efforts to spread their STEM experiences by teaching a 10-week apprenticeship course through the Citizen Schools program. Citizen Schools strives to close to the education and opportunity gap between inner-city schools and schools like Newton North through after school opportunities taught at inner-city schools by outside organizations. Through participating in this program, our design students would create a curriculum that would walk the Citizen School students through the invention process we experienced last year.
Next, Adam, Katie, and Jake presented the Legal Sea Foods project. Katie showed the Congressman our design concepts and market research. She explained our team’s new technique for coming up with questions and brainstorming. Then Jake discussed the technical components of the website and our partnership with GetFused.
Afterwards, we gave Congressman Kennedy one of our InvenTeam t-shirts in a box decorated with spare or broken electronic parts that some of the design students had created.
Throughout the presentation, Congressman Kennedy was very engaged and showed great interest in our program, asking many insightful questions throughout. It was clear that public education, especially in STEM fields, was very important to him. It was a wonderful experience and we were all so grateful for the opportunity to meet him.
-PM
