A non-profit organization is touring Texas, bringing STEM hands-on experience to students. The Mobile Exploration Lab made a stop in El Paso Thursday. It’s part of non-profit organization Learning Undefeated.
Students at Silvestre and Carolina Reyes Elementary School filled the seats of the mobile lab ready to learn.
“We are going from school to school, particularly focused on rural schools and we are teaching kindergarten through 8th grade and focusing on engineering design concepts,” said Cristina Cornejo, Vice President and Texas Regional Director for Learning Undefeated. Learning Undefeated works with the Texas Education Agency, visiting schools that applied for the program in all 20 service regions in the state.
“Bringing a program that’s new and innovative where the kids get to be hands on particularly in a time of COVID when they haven’t seen any programs like this, it’s been fun, and the kids are having a really good tie right now,” Cornejo said.
The two-day stop in El Paso included classes in the mobile lab that replaced their normal science class. The curriculum is tailored to each schools’ needs and schedule.
The kids get to become engineers for a day, learning neat things like how electricity works and creating gadgets like robots, putting into practice some of what they’ve already been learning. All activities fifth-grade students like Hugo Sanchez, not only find fun, but beneficial too.
“It’s really cool since right now we can’t really go anywhere, that they can come to us and show us new things,” Sanchez said. He hopes to become a mechanical engineer. It’s what the program is aiming for, to get students thinking about a future career in STEM.
“This Texas mobile STEM lab is the perfect opportunity for kids to come in, use the engineering design process and to solve real-world problems for the future,” said science teacher Leslie Hess. The future engineers are already on the right track thanks to organizations like Learning Undefeated who are making sure opportunities are available to as many Texas kids as possible.
Learning Undefeated includes a team of people who work together to bring these labs to Texas cities, it includes Executive Vice President and CFO of Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Over 200 applications were submitted by schools to participate in the program in 2020.
