As one of Albuquerque’s leading STEM high schools, Southwest Learning Center is dedicated to helping its students learn all they can about STEM in the classroom. We offer a host of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses to prepare students of all ages to go out into the world and become the next leaders in the STEM sector.

However, as teachers and administrators, we’re often asked what your child can do once the school year ends or outside of the classroom to take advantage of all those special skills they’ve learnedand – most importantly – have fun!

Below we’ve collected some information about some of the fun extracurricular STEM opportunities that take students beyond the classroom and offer some real-world, hands-on application of these skills.

National Project-Based Learning Opportunities

These days, STEM learning is all the rage and there are a host of opportunities for students to take advantage of both locally, as well as around the country. Many of the project-based learning competitions call for the skills our students learn each day and can be a great chance for them to show them off.

Here are just a few:

  • Toshiba’s Exploravision Competition: This is a community-based competition students can participate in that can really be a lot of fun. Students are encouraged to identify an issue in their community that could potentially be solved by an existing technology. Then, they take it one step further by imagining what that technology will look like 20 years into the future and how it can solve the problem they’ve chosen to focus on. The final project consists of them designing a prototype to show how such technology can resolve the issue.
  • Honeywell/Fiestabowl Aerospace Challenge:For students with their eyes to the stars, this competition is a blast. Students participating in the challenge are broken up into smaller groups and tasked with designing a 10-year mission to Mars’s moon Phobos. The goal is to create a plan that can sustain up to 24 astronauts long-term, meaning they’ll need to create a recreation plan for the astronauts, as well as a habitation and work module. But the challenge doesn’t stop there: they also need to plan a secondary mission for the astronauts to complete. The challenge culminates with STEM students defending their work at Arizona State University to Honeywell Aerospace Engineers.
  • e-Cybermission Challenge: Like the Toshiba competition, this U.S. Army-sponsored event tasks students with solving a problem in their community by creating a prototype or other solution employing engineering and scientific processes. Unlike the other competition, students will be able to work with STEM leaders to solicit advice and hone their work.

Contact us today for more about STEM learning outside of the classroom

For those who want to learn more about STEM high school learning, contact Southwest Learning Center today online or call (505) 296-7677.