HOLDING CHECK (l-r) Mike Jensen, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Northwest Indiana; Ken Barry, director of John Will Anderson Club; and Bernice Billups, executive director of Boeing Global Engagement.
You don’t have to be smart to be in STEM, just courageous,” is the advice Julien Mitchell has for other youngsters interested in the STEM program at the John Will Anderson Boys & Girls Club.
Maybe that’s why enrollment reached 263 in Anderson’s Boeing STEM Lab instead of the projected enrollment of 75. Afterschool at the Club has become the right time and the right place to spark an interest in science, engineering, technology, and math for courageous kids.
Boeing offcials liked what they saw during Thursday’s visit to present the Club with the company’s 2023-2024 Global Engagement STEM Grant Award, a $55,000 donation to support the club’s projects.
Applying the physics of mass and motion, lab students built catapults to propel objects. They demonstrated how electrical impulses in the human body can help produce the currents to play an electric guitar.
We’ve been coming here since 2015, said Bernice Billups, Boeing’s executive director of Global Engagement. Back then it was judging science fairs.
“When I go into the STEM lab and I see the projects that the students are working on, they have taken it to the next level,” Billups said. “To see it evolve into this transformative experience is truly an opportunity to see what an investment in this community can bring. I believe it will be a nucleus of transformation for the entire community.”
Anderson Club director Ken Barry told a heartwarming story about the STEM lab’s success. “When I walked into the Gary club last year in March, we only had 34 members. Our club members did not have an excitement for STEM and I knew it needed the right person.”
In July 2022, Barry said, “A grandma brought a granddaughter to the club to apply for a position as a youth development professional. While waiting on her granddaughter, our team members discovered that grandma was a real life engineer with decades of experience teaching science, technology, engineering, and math to students.”
Barry hired Brenda Thomas that same day and her granddaughter, too. Thomas, a retired industrial arts and industrial technology teacher, had 41 years experience in the Gary school district.
By August, Thomas had developed a STEM lab taste test for club members. “I made an announcement over the loudspeaker that the STEM lab was opening, and that any kid that wants to participate to come up by the STEM lab door, now. Well, I walked out of my office. I turned to my left and I looked down the hall, there’s 25 to 30 kids lined up outside the door.”
