On July 5th, we welcomed more than 225 students to the first ever SOCSD Summer STEAM camp hosted at South Orangetown Middle School.  Students in grades 1-9 will spend two weeks immersed in areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. Seventeen teachers from all grades are teaching courses such as Kitchen Chemistry, Fairy Tale Engineering, Rube Goldberg Inventions, Physics of Sports, Biology, Coding, 3D printing, and more. Students are grouped by age and take three hour long courses each day and will switch courses mid-stream.

Our youngest campers are participating in:

• Fairytale engineering (Designing solutions to problems characters face in fairlytales)
• Rube Goldberg’s Invention Convention
• All About Birds (Bird watching and learning about bird adaptations)
• Technology  (Lego robotics and stop motion films)
• Kitchen Chemistry (Making ice cream, butter, sink and float experiments etc)
• “I’m Deserted on an Island…” (Engineering solutions to being stranded on an island

Our incoming 3-5 graders are taking courses in:

• Biology (bottle ecosystems, fingerprinting, Parts of the blood)
• Engineering and Design Process (Making windmills, airplanes etc)
• Kitchen Chemistry
• The Physics of Sports
• Inventions and Designs (Catapults and Pom-pom drop races)
• Technology (Coding)

Our oldest campers are taking four two-week long courses in:

• Physics (Marble Roller Coaster Design and Projectile Launchers)
• Force and Motion Studies (airplanes, egg drops etc.)
• Biology (Dissection, Fingerprinting, DNA Extraction etc)
• Technology (Art, and math design programs, coding, and robotics)

We are so excited to be able to give this opportunity to the children of South Orangetown. We look forward to presenting their finished projects on the last day of camp on July 15th.

A special thank you to our Superintendent, Dr. Pritchard for all of his support, Samantha Levine and Jessenia Cursio for coordinating and running the camp, and to all of our SOCSD Summer Camp Teachers for making this program a huge success.