Speaker
Description
Speaker: David Bondurant, Pikes Peak Section Chair
The Pikes Peak Section believes that USA is not graduating enough STEAM students to allow us to remain competitive and diversify our workforce. We believe that it is critical to expose and mentor both Middle School Students and their parents to STEAM experiences, successful role models, and the excitement of these careers.
Our solution is Middle School Summer Camps which acquaint both students and their parents to mentors across a range of IEEE career stages (students, YP, WIE, and Life Members), provides hands-on technical experiences, and exciting technical tours. Our specific proposal for 2025 is a Summer School at Monument, CO D-38 Lewis-Palmer Middle which will offer up to 30 student hands-out experience with programming Microsoft Micro:Bit controllers and applying it to a Chat Bot Robot which the student take home to continue their experimentation. In the future, we propose to add multimedia content for both lab demonstrations and mentoring in combination with exciting group tours for students and parents to local Scientific venues.
Our team, the Pikes Peak STEAM Team began monthly meeting in February 2025 to train volunteers and prepare for our STEAM projects.
Our Ask is for the IEEE to co-sponsor $500-750 of about $2000 total in Summer Camp costs to be shared with Pikes Peak Section, the Mikkelson Foundation (run by James Mikkelson, a Pikes Peak Life Senior Member) and other IEEE Grants.
Pikes Peak Section covers the entire Southern half of the state. Colorado has 880K Students, 1927 Schools of which 262 are Charter Schools and 104 are Innovation Schools.
We propose to start with one school in 2025 and develop a plan to grow the program to serve other Middle Schools in Southern Colorado in 2026 and in following years expand program to Region 5 and throughout the US.
We believe that this approach achieves IEEE objectives to increase the IEEE YP pipeline by increasing STEAM graduates and engage our Industrial members with our program. Our group mentor program supports the ONE IEEE program.
| IEEE Organizational Unit | Pikes Peak |
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