Georgia Tech-Savannah recently held a weeklong camp for elementary students in Chatham, Liberty, and Effingham County designed to peak their interest in math and science.
 
The Full STEAM Ahead camp combines Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math practices into fun activities that show elementary students some of the real world applications of those disciplines.

The camp was held at Liberty County Elementary School from June 18-22. It was open to all area elementary students but a group of local social workers raised funds so that some students could attend for free.

Then from June 25-29, the camp was held at the Georgia Tech campus in Savannah for Chatham County students and at Blandford Elementary School in Rincon for Effingham County students.
 
Designed by the team at the college’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Math and Computing, the camp offered kindergartners through fifth graders four different activities that combined science and creativity.
 
The students learned how to create a robotic animal by combining crafting materials, motors and LED lights on a Hummingbird circuit board. The students used Scratch software to learn the introductory coding skills to animate their animatronics.
 
Another class challenged the students’ engineering skills through activities such as making a kite, creating a marble maze and building a structure to protect an egg as it dropped to the ground.
 
The students also used Georgia Tech’s EarSketch program to create unique musical compositions. Designed by Georgia Tech faculty, EarSketch introduces students to coding principles by teaching them how to use JavaScript or Python, two of the most popular programming languages, to create sounds that combine to become an original music piece.
 
Lastly, the students used tablets to program a drone to complete an obstacle course.