STEAM Fair at Eastport-South Manor Central Schools

The Eastport-South Manor Central School District hosted its second annual STEAM Fair on Thursday, May 11, where students in kindergarten through sixth grade could participate in interactive exhibits that also encouraged intellectual and scientific thinking.

“We wanted to do something with our students to show that learning is fun, learning is imaginative… there’s no better way to learn than with hands-on learning,” district superintendent Joseph Steimel, said.

The fair was hosted in the Eastport-South Manor Junior/Senior High School, inside the building’s gymnasium and the hallway outside of it.  Over 20 activities, supervised by school faculty, covered a wide range of subjects, from simple mathematics to the construction of wind-resistant shelters. The fair is an important part of the district’s STEAM program, which seeks to educate students on the subjects of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics.

“We’re trying to give [students] skills they can take with them,” Eastport Elementary School principal Thomas Fabian, said.

The school district has invested greatly in its STEAM program. The district’s curriculum features a “STEAM” room, where students use advanced technological equipment to expand their knowledge of the program’s five key subject areas.  The STEAM Fair itself is an annual event that was first hosted last year.  In a hallway outside the gymnasium, multiple science projects made by students further conveyed STEAM’s goal of mixing the sciences, mathematics, and the arts together for students.

“Our biggest thing is the STEAM program,” Dayton Avenue School principal Dr. Shelita Watkis, said.  “[We want] to get [students] really thinking…”

The STEAM program’s goal was illustrated throughout the fair’s interactive booths, which fused hands-on activities with educational components.  One of the booths featured Word and Math Magicians, an activity in which students tied marked pieces of foam together with string in order to formulate simple mathematic equations and words.  The booth’s supervisor, teaching assistant Trish Collins, assigned students an equation or word, and the students dove through small pools of foam pieces in order to assemble their assigned equation or word.

“This [activity] teaches number sense and light correspondence,” Collins said.

Another activity tasked students with designing a wind-resistant shelter.  The “Shelter Building—Huff & Puff” booth was themed to the fairy tale of the ‘The Three Little Pigs.”  Students were instructed to build a shelter out of household materials like popsicle sticks and tin toil, that could resist the Big Bad Wolf’s breath.  Each proposed shelter was then subjected to the strong gusts of a hairdryer in order to test whether the shelter was strong enough to avoid being knocked over.

“The kids really seem to enjoy the STEAM activities,” activity supervisor and Tuttle Avenue School second-grade teacher, Elise Allen, said.  “It’s great to see the community come out and support the STEAM curriculum.”

The fairy tale theming continued with the “Billy Goats Gruff Bridges” booth.  Students were given a long sheet of blue paper to represent a river, and they were told to design a bridge for goats to cross the river with.  The activity tasked students to engage with the basic principles of engineering, as they were encouraged to make a feasible bridge design incorporating basic architectural elements like arches.

“Math comes into play when [the students are] doing different kinds of bridges,” activity supervisor and Dayton Avenue School Special Education teacher Marli Wilkins, said.

The STEAM Fair also featured two activities hosted by KidOYO, a programming company specializing in educating students about coding.  One of the activities tasked students with competing against a KidOYO “code master” in a coding competition.  Participants had to finish writing a section of code before the code master, who could only code with one hand.  The second activity featured a video game designed by another KidOYO code master, where students had to navigate a video game character through a mixture of procedurally generated platforms and obstacles.

“There’s been hundreds [of students] that have come by [our table],” KidOYO operator  Melora Loffreto, said.  “The kids like the competitive part of it.”

In addition to KidOYO, the fair had a booth operated by the Eastport-South Manor High School Robotics Team.  A small, rectangular walled space was erected in a corner of the gymnasium for students to control remotely operated robotic constructs capable of lifting small objects.  The Suffolk County Water Authority had a booth in the middle of the main gymnasium, where a representative explained the water cycle to passersby.  Fair attendees could also make LEGO constructs on special miniature walls, compete to see how many plastic cups they could stack, and take a celebratory photograph in front of a green screen, among a plethora of other activities.

“It’s a great event for all family members to attend and work together,” Dayton Avenue Library teacher Cheryl Skidmore, said.

Multiple event organizers hoped that this year’s fair attracted as large a crowd as last year’s fair.  Two teachers expressed their hope that at least 700 students attended this year’s fair.  The Eastport-South Manor Central School District plans to host another STEAM Fair next year, and the school district is also investing in the expansion of the STEAM program throughout its schools.

“We hope this continues forever,” superintendent Steimel said.