Polital STEAM offers extracurricular STEAM educational programming. STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. Including Arts in the traditional STEM fields allows for broader transdisciplinary integration resulting in more engaging lessons and deeper learning.

Polital STEAM is operated by Toni York, a STEAM educator with 20 years of experience in designing and teaching extracurricular programming from private tutoring to after school clubs and summer camps. Toni has degrees in Music, Physics, Computer Science, Systems Engineering, and Mathematics and is currently a PhD candidate studying Mathematics Education.

These programs offer engaging and accessible STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) content for middle school students via Zoom-based clubs run in partnership with sponsoring organizations. Previous programs have been run with AFRL Rome Lab and the Griffiss Institute. Sponsoring organizations handle local community advertising, registration, and communication with students’ parents. Polital STEAM provides curriculum, handles student materials inventory and shipping, recruits guest speakers from relevant careers, and leads Zoom sessions with students.

Sessions can be scheduled flexibly to meet your needs. Up to 20 students can meet daily or weekly for 2- or 6-hour sessions. The educational content is research-based, tested, and designed and taught by an experienced STEAM educator (resume and references available on request). Program activities include a variety of discussions, videos, guided experiments, hands-on projects, and guest speaker talks with Q&A.

Students should be in grades 5 through 8. They must have a reliable internet connection and a computer with a webcam to run Zoom and do basic web browsing. No experience is required and all materials are shipped directly to the student as part of the cost of the program.

This program offers a flexible set of modules that cover different engineering topics with a variety of lessons, discussions, activities, experiments, and hands-on design projects. Existing modules include Intro/Systems, Civil, Mechanical, Acoustical, Aerospace, and Electrical Engineering. Each module includes two 1.5-hour blocks of instructional content and a hands-on design project. Each module is also designed to include a talk and Q&A session with a guest speaker from that engineering field. The program can be run in a variety of configurations including 1-week clubs with full-day meetings, multi-week weekend clubs, and multi-week after school clubs.

This program offers integrated content highlighting connections between different STEAM areas by building lessons around a theme of interest to middle school students. The existing program takes rocks as its theme and includes earth science, mathematics, computer science, technology, engineering, and art content. Activities include research-based integrated lessons, digital and video content, discussions, group presentations, hands-on activities, and coding projects. The 5-day format includes 6-hour daily meetings with 18 hours of instructional content, supervised breaks, and 5 guest speaker talks and Q&A sessions.