STEAM at The Village High School

(From left) Olivia Bangs, Vanathi Selvan, Urvashi Deshpande, Varun Agarwal, Roberto Martelli, Pavithr Goli, Divyesh Kumar and Puneetha Goli represent this year’s team for the MIT Challenge. (Photo by Alicia Merrifield)

As recently ranked by Niche as one of the top 6 percent of STEAM schools in the state, The Village School has been working to greatly strengthen its science, technology, engineering, art and math departments. Just this past week on Wednesday, Nov. 8, The Village School hosted a STEAM All-School Open House on National STEAM Day, allowing both prospective and current parents to visit classes as well as have an opportunity to see the STEAM projects that Village School students are working on.

Some of the displays in the high school building included projects done for science classes, including student-built models of Ferris wheels, intricate 3-D models of the cell and cell membrane, and elaborate human brain models. World History Honor students were also given the opportunity to display models of civilizations that they designed, tying in the art aspect of STEAM.

(From left) Tommy Wan, Aditya Agrawal, Lucas Melanson and Aditya Deshpande represent last year’s team for the MIT Challenge. (Photo: Alicia Merrifield)

In addition to the school projects, the High School Open House also shined a light on the Village School’s entrepreneurship diploma students. Working with the Founding Partner Bridges to Wealth at The Wharton School, the Village School launched the Entrepreneurship Diploma last year, for students interested in pursuing a career in business. Students who are part of this program focus on leadership development, marketing, money management in addition to other key strategies.

The High School Open House also highlighted The Village School’s unique collaboration with MIT. Through a series of in-school challenges assigned by MIT, students were able to develop amazing projects that focused on bioengineering, robotics, and computer coding.  One such project includes the student-developed Flood Sensor and its companion app, both which were designed to target the issue of weak flooding warnings in the city of Houston. Students have spent over a year, working to perfect it. Another MIT project includes rebuilding Houston from scratch in order to make it more technologically advanced, while also making it greener and more energy efficient. Students working on this challenge focused on futuristic modes of transportation, housing development, and energy farms.

(From left) Vaani Gupta and Puneetha Goli explain their portion of the MIT Challenge. (Photo: Alicia Merrifield)

Vaani Gupta, a 10th grader who is working on one of the MIT projects, expresses the positive feeling of encouragement that she received through the Open House. “From autonomous cars to hyper loops to kinetic energy, I really enjoyed expressing our ideas for this year's MIT challenge. It was great to share our perspectives and views of the future city of Houston to the people.”