Midnight’s Children

“We remade the entire City of Longmont’s website,” says Cameron Taylor, a 2013 graduate from Longmont’s Skyline High School. He and senior Tim Finnegan started with an HTML framework and did some CSS (compsci speak). “One of our other friends in the STEM Academy wrote a Python script to take their website’s content, and put it into ours.” Taylor’s also the first to receive a certificate from their STEM academy, a collaboration effort with CU Boulder’s School of Engineering. With it, he’s guaranteed admission.

Skyline also received funds from the Race to the Top Grant. They plan on integrating the STEM Academy (not an extracurricular program) into their new Innovation Center replete with an electronics lab and tech area and Apple Genius who intends students to break computers and fix them, becomeing Apple-certified by the spring semester. Senior engineering projects will also be prototyped before being presented at the CU Design Expo. Taylor, along with Finnegan and senior Josie Lamp—one of the 350 students in the compsci program—as well as Longmont Hackathon winner Jackson Roberts, are helping shape the Center. “I think we inadvertently started it,” says Finnegan.

For the last year and a half, before SVVSD’s $16.6 million grant, compsci students have been working on city projects “just for fun.” It was Patricia Quinones, the district’s executive director of innovative programs, who envisioned a place where companies can request students’ work in exchange for class credits, senior final projects or, in some cases, monetary payment. Finnegan  just got greenlit to build Cavalry Church’s webiste. “I think there’s a real gap between industrial needs and who the workers are,” Quinones says. “We don’t have enough.”

More impressive is how Skyline structured their STEM curriculum. Whereas some schools pay for their curriculum, they worked backwards talking to CU’s engineering school to develop one with “rigor and depth.” That’s not to say Project Lead the Way programs are any less. In fact, BVSD’s Centaurus High School uses it and has the same pre-engineering partnership with CU as Skyline does. Involvement and feedback from outside industries seem to be coming in waves. Why, even a trainer from Stanford’s d.school is consulting with Spark! Discovery Preschool.

One of the big additions to Spark! is the Discovery Center for Make/Hack/Play. Commandeering the majority of the old library, the maker space, which includes many of the aforementioned toys, encourages preschoolers and parents to learn alongside each other, and also invites elementary kids. Part of the brains behind its creation, Paige Gordon is most excited for the potential robot play. Resting in a cubby on her office wall is her “first little bit of inspiration”—a BristleBot made out of a pink toothbrush head, larger than a tadpole with red and black wires for tails. Complete the circuit, and the robot jitters around like a beetle on Adderall.

It’s a simple example Sparks! overall ambition to teach the design process. “It’s about identity,” Gordon says. “Kids see themselves as a person that can solve problems.” She thinks back on the makeshift city of boxes that 4-year-olds built. “Even if it’s with cardboard.”