STEMposium by: Sammie

From May 12-17, I was in Germany for a school associated program called STEMposium. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEMposium is an event where students from all of the schools around Europe come together into teams to try and solve a problem in a unique way. There are six kids per team and 15 teams, each named after a letter of the Greek alphabet. Each of the six students on each team had a different job, I was a biotechnology engineer. The other jobs were disaster response, green technology engineer, robotics engineer, computer simulations, and environmental engineer. In the weeks leading up to STEM, emails are sent out with hints about what the scenario is, and about two weeks before-hand, they give you your team name, the people on your team, and what job you have. I was put on Team Zeta.
This is my team at the press conference table.

These are my roommates and I on the bus.

We arrived Sunday night and were instantly plunged into the disaster without even having met our teams. Our scenario was that there had been a three year drought in Germany, a bark beetle infestation, rising CO2 levels, and four forest fires burning around Heidelberg, and two within city limits. We did a little bit of team building that night, because we hadn't started our classes yet. The next day, we started classes, they were called STEMinars. We would have two three-hour classes a day followed by press conferences from each team, a guest speaker, dinner, and then group time from 8:00-10:00. Lights out was at 10:30 and we had to wake up at 6:00 the next morning. On Wednesday, we had field trips. Biotech and enviro went to the Odenwald forest (the location of two of the fires). We spent a day hiking and then we went to the Heidelberg Castle.

Me holding a badger skin.

We walked back to the bus with a piece of sticky paper and put anything we thought was pretty onto it. This was mine.

Heidelberg

Heidelberg

The hill we walked up to to get to the castle.

The inside of the castle.

inside

view from the castle

The next day, biotech went to the zoo! We saw the zoo keepers feed the sea lions and we got to pet the tortoises!

This single slab of meat is bigger than me.

The zookeeper actually let us step inside of the tortoise habitat to pet them.

About 8 of us bought masks!

Thursday afternoon, we had two hours to put any final touches on our project that we needed to. Then, at 3:30, it was time for open house and judging.

Team Zeta's final project.

That night, we had a jeopardy formatted quiz game called STEM bowl. There were points available for STEM bowl, but my team didn't get many.