KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In conjunction with School Day at The K on Thursday, April 21, 2022, KSHB 41 News is profiling programs throughout the Kansas City area which put a spotlight on STEM education. One such program is KC STEM Alliance.
“If you live in Kansas City, you’re living smack in the middle of STEM education central,” Martha McCabe said.
McCabe is the executive director of KC STEM Alliance. Since 2011, the organization has facilitated STEM education in public, private and home-school settings across the Kansas City region.
Most recently, the organization has made the commitment to close the racial gap in STEM education and careers.
“What we’re hearing from our companies is their solutions are better when the teams at the company are diverse. You’re not going to get diverse employees if you don’t start backwards mapping those experiences,” McCabe pointed out.
To map those experiences, KC STEM Alliances created the KC Engineering Zone at its location on the University of Missouri - Kansas City campus, at 4825 Troost Avenue.
The lab allows students in schools without labs of their own to build robots and work on projects after school and on Saturdays. The alliance has also made a concerted effort to bring in mentors who may have similar backgrounds to children in the programs.
“So students can see themselves in them, maybe someone who grew up in the same neighborhood, or went to the same high school,” McCabe said.
The alliance’s main mission is to implement two nationally-recognized STEM programs in classrooms around Kansas City. Project Lead The Way offers K-12 courses specific to biomedical, computer science, and engineering topics. FIRST Robotics is a program which hosts challenges for students pre-k through grade 12. The name is an acronym for For Inspiration Recognition of Science and Technology. 10 FIRST teams from Kansas City are currently competing in an international challenge.
McCabe said KC STEM Alliance and its partners like DeBruce Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, Cerner, Garmin, Black & Veatch and Burns & McDonnell believe STEM education will create the next generation of problem-solvers across all industries.
“When we think about STEM, some people do go into those silos of science, technology, engineering and math,” McCabe said. “What we really understand is that in order to solve any problem, you name it, you’re going to be using a little bit of all of those skillsets.”
KC STEM Alliance will host a series of events called Remake Learning Days May 6 through 16 all across the city to encourage families to explore STEM opportunities. More information is available on the organization’s website.
