A STEM Career Awareness Program
Step Into STEM is a career awareness program designed to help students visualize a future in STEM careers like those being created at the VelocityTX Innovation Campus. Step Into STEM seeks to build this region's workforce by inspiring middle school students to engage in STEM education and prepare for the abundant, high-paying STEM careers filtering into San Antonio.
The program includes Science Workshops, Family Nights, and Classroom Career Toolkits.
Science Workshops are held at the VelocityTX Innovation Center. The goal is to inspire students to pursue STEM pathways by engaging in challenging, hands-on science activities and meeting local, successful STEM professionals. The workshop includes:
● Engineering Challenge: hands-on, engaging engineering design challenge with a professional engineer on-site showcasing their work and discussing becoming an engineer.
● Genes-in-a-Tube: hands-on experiment extracting "self" DNA from cheek cells, visualizing DNA, and storing DNA in a Genes-in-a-Tube necklace with career scientists on-site showcasing their work and discussing becoming a scientist.
● Bioscience Laboratory Tours of a working biomanufacturing lab.
STEM Family Nights are events for the entire school to experience hands-on activities, allowing parents to work with their children to launch rockets, program robots, explore with microscopes, and more. The goal is to build a STEM learning culture, engage families, and spark future STEM programming efforts.
Classroom Career Toolkits are distributed to CIS-SA Site Coordinators at the participating middle schools and include:
● Microscope Mystery: includes USB microscopes for students to explore a "mystery slide" featuring parts of plants or animals.
● Hydraulic Robotic Claws: students will build, test, and compete with claws that run off pneumatics.
● STEM Careers BINGO: includes bingo cards featuring 45 different STEM jobs. ● Classroom Poster and Stickers: available in each classroom with a QR code inviting students to follow @stepintostemsa, an Instagram account showcasing local STEM professionals and highlighting the variety of STEM professions available in San Antonio.