School Projects Earn $50,000 in APEGA Awards
Eleven hands-on, student-led initiatives have received new APEGA grants, giving their teachers that extra boost to energize their lessons with inspiring experiences. The STEM-focused projects are the inaugural winners of APEGA’s Innovation in Education Awards, sharing $50,000 in all.
Among the adventures in learning represented are:
- creating a turbine to charge cell phones
- developing multimedia displays in a community observatory
- programming sensors to optimize plant care in Martian soil
- participating in a new robotics program
- prototyping technologies that can withstand natural disasters
- installing interpretive trail signs to showcase geological, ecological, and aboriginal learnings
“APEGA wants to help expose students to the real-life applications of science, technology, engineering, and math, and the positive impacts that the associated fields have on the world,” says APEGA Registrar & CEO Jay Nagendran, P.Eng., FEC. “We look forward to seeing the results of these projects and hearing how the students engaged in them.”
Students in grades 2 to 12, attending 12 different schools represented by seven school boards, will complete their projects in the 2018/2019 school year, kicking off a program that replaces the APEGA Teacher Awards. Through the APEGA Innovation in Education Awards, we continue to celebrate exceptional teachers—while helping them implement larger STEM initiatives.
Innovation in Education is part of APEGA’s K-12 Outreach Program, which strives to increase awareness and excitement for engineering and geoscience topics and associated careers. Each chosen initiative contains activities that focus on engineering or geoscience and relate to realistic applications that could have a positive impact on the students’ communities.
APEGA members are volunteering to mentor students and act as subject matter experts.