NVC Students Use STEM Skills to Give Back to Community

Northwest Vista College students are not just sitting in an idle classroom, they are making reading fun for elementary students. And, getting kids to read is becoming a national crisis.

“Per the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), there has been a significant decline in reading skills during the last three years due to the pandemic—only about 10-30% of all students in public schools can read at grade level proficiently.”

To alleviate the crisis, a group of students from the PLUS+STEM program at NVC partnered with Wanke Elementary’s Learning Tree liaison Steven Maison to make an oversized wood reading station that resembles an old-school TV. The purpose is to get kids more engaged with reading. The NVC students recently delivered the finished project and Steven will add some finishing retro touches such as an antenna, nobs, school colors lights and a microphone so the kids can hear themselves read in the vintage TV.

This project was perfect on so many levels. College students often can’t see the connection that STEM programs provide, but NVC’s Dr. Thomas Pressley said this partnership “has allowed the engineering faculty to facilitate these types of larger projects that demonstrate to students that they are using engineering, math, physics, and computer science to support and give back to the local community.”

Three Plus+STEM college student cohorts from summer 2022 (Luis Cardona, Matthew Castaneda, Sebastian Mendoza, Dominic Muniz), fall 2022 (Jorja Harris, Astrid Lopez, Ian Ross, Sira Shah, Alana Wimberley, and spring 2023 (Heyam Ata, Amanda Hernandez, Sira Shah, Casimiro Sigala, Max Wilson) worked under the direction of Thomas Pressly and Mark Jurena in the NVC MLH-214 Makerspace to design, develop, construct, test, and improve the reading aid.  He developed an idea of a reading station that had the appearance of a vintage television set, to make reading more engaging for the elementary school students. 

“This helps students identify themselves as belonging in an engineering and or computer science program and allowing them to feel the accomplishment of giving back to the community,” Thomas added.

Plus+STEM – Portal Leading to Undergraduate Success in Science, Technology, Engineering & Math – is funded by a Department of Education Grant.  The creation of the NVC Makerspace has also been partially funded through multiple Alamo Colleges Innovation Grants including support through the Jane Moser Drum Encouragement Fund. The support of Prakash Nair (Plus+STEM Principle Investigator), Roxanne Penaloza (Plus+STEM Grant Manager), Richard Crabb (Academic Program Coordinator for the Learning Assistance Services in which the NVC Makerspace resides), James Sosso (Makerspace staff) and Marco Konradi (Makerspace staff) are gratefully acknowledged.