STEAM STUDENT OF THE MONTH

MYFM 94.1 and Williams Funeral Home Ltd present STEAM Student of the Month for June
https://www.stthomastoday.ca/steam-student-of-the-month/

Meet the STEAM Student of the Month - June 2021
Name:  Thomas Papp-Simon
School: Western University – Honours Specialization Graduate 2021
Time with STEAM: 3 months


Intro:
As a part of Western University’s Community Engaged Learning Seminar in Biology course, Thomas came to us to support the creation of the Bold Biology Summer Camp@Home experience. As a student group lead, Thomas helped to develop multiple engaging projects that we are excited to unveil for this summer’s camp that will provide fun learning experiments for the entire family.  These ideas led to his becoming a Western University “Share Your Experience” essay winner making our summer camp now award winning! We are thrilled to introduce Thomas, and the next generation of teachers, innovators and problem solvers. Learn more about STEAM Education Centre’s school and community programs for student engagement and experiential learning at www.steameducation.ca.
The Project: 
Hi, my name is Thomas Papp-Simon, and I just graduated from Western University with an Honours Specialization in Biology. As a part of the Community Engaged Learning program at Western, I worked on developing a biology summer camp along with two of my classmates, Alice and Brian. This biology summer program was designed to introduce different aspects of biology in a fun and interactive manner in a week-long summer camp. Each day of the week has its own theme and is composed of a few experiments where the students can explore different areas of the diverse field of biology!
Thomas’ background:
I’ve just finished the last year of my biology degree, where one of the courses I had to take was a seminar course. This course gave my colleagues and I the opportunity to partner with the STEAM Education Centre with the goal of interactively teaching young students about biology! I used to make educational videos on YouTube when I was younger, so that experience helped me in making the educational videos for this biology summer program, where I explained how to do each experiment step-by-step.
What difference do you think the project you are working on will have?
It is important to realize that not every student has the same privileges when it comes to learning and education. Developing this project will give the opportunity and the resources needed for those students to learn more about biology and science. Programs like this one can be developed for different subjects related to science, technology, engineering, art, and math, which can encourage more and more students to become interested in being our next generation of scientists!