DianeNewBo

On February 19, 2020 students and educators from George Washington Elementary and Keokuk High School were invited to present during STEM Day at the Capitol so legislators could see the impact of programs implemented through the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council. The Keokuk Community School District has Scale Up programs in every building from Preschool through high school including Pint Size Science, Engineering is Elementary, STEM In Action, Differentiated Math Centers, Making STEM Connections, Engineering the Future, Computer Science Principles, and Bootstrap Data Science.

The concept was hatched by the STEM Council in its first year: Devise a system by which youth across Iowa, especially those most deserving, enjoy some of the best STEM education kits, curricula, software, games and courses the world has to offer. Scale-Up was born, the most heavily invested program of any conducted by the Council’s network team. Now approaching its ninth year, a new set of thirteen highly-anticipated STEM Scale-Up Programs are being made available to cross-curricular educators from PreK-12 schools, afterschool programs and other educational organizations.

A new Des Moines based company —Roboflow—is looking to change that by removing the pain points that developers come across when creating computer vision and AR apps. Founded by Brad Dwyer and Joseph Nelson, Roboflow offers toolsets that make developing computer vision and AR apps easier.

Building a culture to grow and expand workplace experiences, the STEM BEST Program encourages teachers and industry professionals to work side-by-side on curriculum and projects that give students actual workplace experience and an understanding of the opportunities and required skills for careers in STEM fields.

Today, with the help of the AIM Institute, nearly 1,000 students at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Council Bluffs learned the fundamentals of computer programming as part of the international Hour of Code initiative.

The medical technology and learning lab is filled with tools that allows anyone to “transform their ideas for improving patient care into tangible prototypes to be tested and reviewed for implementation,” according to a news release.

Planning and implementation are well under way for 12 awarded Computer Science is Elementary schools, a joint project of the Iowa Department of Education and the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council. For Kingsley-Pierson Elementary, students are already building confidence in computer science after only a couple months of implementing computer science into the elementary curriculum.