Back to School!
It was a pleasure to welcome returning and new teachers at the August 15th SMILE Teachers Workshop which was the start of the 30th year of the SMILE Program in Rhode Island. These teachers are the backbone of SMILE, providing students with a safe place to explore STEM topics, being caring role models, and promoting good school citizenship, teamwork, and a positive peer culture where it is cool to be smart. SMILE teachers are the best!! They are now recruiting new students and welcoming returning ones. Clubs are starting and students are excited to be a part of SMILE. We hope you are all excitedly anticipating this year’s meetings and events.
Teacher’s Workshop
On August 15th, a teacher’s workshop was held for the Elementary, Middle School, and High School teachers.
SMILE elementary teachers had an exciting time doing the engineering activities developed by Claudia Hodderson and presented by Amy Horne and Maria DePalma from WW Horgan Elementary. Activities included the construction of paper chains in a race that involved supply chain issues, learning about the chemistry of ice cream while making it in a plastic bag, forensic details of fingerprinting, fingerprint patterns and characteristics, paper chromatography of leaf colors, introduction to structural engineering through building geodomes, creating a marble run from cardboard, and designing and building a mechanical hand that opens and closes. Teachers discussed the concepts in each activity and shared their ideas about the details of the constructions.
The Middle School teachers learned about a variety of STEM activities that they will present to their weekly club meetings. These activities include making tetrahedral kites, mentos fountains, and spool racers. Through these activities, students will learn about the scientific method, kinetic and potential energy, testing variables, and more. The teachers were very excited about the upcoming curriculum and, as always, their expertise will only enhance what we have provided. As always, we are grateful for the hard work and dedication of our teachers to the SMILE program.
The High School workshop was led by Eddie Perez, a 4th-year computer engineering student at URI. He developed and presented a variety of engineering activities for the high school SMILE teachers. The activities included constructing a cotton ball launcher to review concepts regarding potential and kinetic energies, building a balloon-powered car, learning about nanotechnology by dropping alka-seltzer tablets into water, observing how the size of the tablet affects the respective reaction with the water, and learning more about biomedical engineering and the engineering design process principles. They did this by creating a surgical device using the materials provided and testing their device by playing a makeshift “surgery” game where they had to grasp small objects from a container without knocking over nearby dominos. Other activities included learning about encoding systems, barcodes and encryption, algorithm design, and using algorithms for sorting. Teachers did all the activities, shared their ideas about the new curriculum and were excited to bring these activities back to their students.
Magazine Feature
We are proud to announce that the SMILE Program was featured in 41°N, Rhode Island’s Ocean & Coastal Magazine! This is the 2nd Issue of the 15th Volume that covers the summer and fall of 2023, titled: The Learning Issue. From pages 30-35, the article highlights the importance of our goal here at SMILE to provide STEM education to kids who don’t often have access to the resources to learn about these topics. This education in turn helps make these kids ready to take on the STEM world in college and beyond. The article also talks about a handful of other organizations like SMILE in Rhode Island such as STEM Mentoring RI and Save The Bay and the positive impact that these programs can have on kids by bringing the STEM field to their attention. STEM education in the US has been proven to be deficient, and this makes programs like ours even more important, especially because STEM is a large driving force in the economy currently, and growing bigger still. Never has it been more integral to give students the opportunity to learn more about STEM careers and we are happy to contribute to these kids’ education.
College Scholarships
We are happy to announce the recipients of the Saul Nulman SMILE College Scholarship. This gives up to six SMILE seniors a $500 scholarship for college. This year the recipients are Todd Brundage Jr. from Newport, Katelyn Daniewicz and Gabrielle Young from Westerly, and Crystal Garrido and Natalia Perez from West Warwick. We are pleased to be able to help them attend the University of Rhode Island and the College of the Holy Cross. In the past 30 years, SMILE students have gone to 376 different universities