 My favorite thing so far at this week at camp has been programming with the micro bits. My favorite thing is to build stuff like I've never built anything with technology. My favorite thing I did in this week at camp was to just code with the micro bits. The STEM Career Connections Project connects middle school youth from a rural mountain community in Eagle County Colorado to STEM career pathways through investigations with programmable sensors and interactions with STEM professionals. There are three components to the STEM Career Connections model. The sensor immersion curriculum is enhanced through community partnerships that connect youth to STEM mentors, embedded our opportunities to explore career interests and discover STEM opportunities within their local community and beyond. We work with youth from historically marginalized populations that are underrepresented in STEM careers and partner with local community organizations like Vale Valley Foundation's Youth Power 365 to help increase awareness of STEM careers in their community. The most important part about recruiting students into our summer program is identifying the kids that need summer learning the most. Kids that may not normally have access or opportunity in the summer where we can combine education and experience for them. Youth Power 365 does every effort we can to make our summer programs accessible and also to support working families. A majority of students who are participating in our summer programs pay nothing at all. The students are working with programmable sensors so students code the micro bit that takes inputs from the sensors to process data that the students can use in their individual projects. My favorite part was programming everything into the micro bit plus the gator bit can do so much more. That's been like really fun because I just love doing it. There were just so many fun steps and you could really just experiment with all the buttons and you could create really amazing fun codes and they would work really well. Youth in STEM classes, after-school programs and summer programs use our sensor immersion curriculum to build a data collection system that they can apply to real-world problems. They also discover that many people rely on sensors to do their jobs. Working with mentors is really fun. When I first started off with the micro bit it was very challenging. When a mentor came in they taught me a lot. They've had mentors come in with professions in STEM and shown them how they use STEM in their lives in the real world and they seem to take a big interest in it. It's been great having the kids be able to talk with mentors you know somebody in a STEM career that's you know able to kind of share some real-world knowledge because a lot of those kids they're looking for that why do we do things. The mentors help youth design projects that use sensor technology to solve local problems such as creating an early warning system to detect wildfires and building a smart garden that conserves water or can detect when the soil is too dry. You can check the soil because you can program it from your computer and if it's wet it will tell you the scale like for example 0.73 that's good enough but if it's dry it'll beep so it'll be very useful for people that don't even take care of their plants. Youth used sensors to monitor conditions within the garden beds in a local community garden. Mentored by a master gardener youth collected data that could help increase how much the garden produced. We also partnered with Walking Mountain Science Centers after school STEM Curiosity Lab on a composting unit where youth program sensors to monitor their compost bins. They were mentored by a soil scientist from a local composting facility. In this project we were able to see partnerships take place in multiple levels between changing how we worked with the compost facility to bringing in the STEM Career Connections expertise as well as some internal assets. Walking Mountain Science Center has offered the STEM Curiosity Lab program at Yale County Schools Public Middle Schools for over a decade. This has given us a strong and trusted relationship with parents, schools, school administrators and the general community. This is a fun new way to work with our partners. You just never know what's going to happen until you ask. We partnered with school districts, college and career readiness counselors to create activities that help youth to learn about STEM careers. It's been a lot of fun and highly beneficial to see the real-world uses of STEM help make the classroom lessons come to life. I've learned that if you want to be in a STEM job you have to have a lot more creativity. And then working with these sensors we can just help the world with our two hands. Collaboration between teachers and STEM professionals and school counselors like myself can help to foster a positive attitude toward work and learning and the development of social skills which can really help students in building positive relationships with adults to support their success. For the past few years in my STEAM classroom I have used the STEM career connections model. The sensor immersion unit has been really engaging for my kids because it's had that STEM career connection and they're able to see how sensors are used in the world. I've also found that this model has increased my students engagement in wanting to go into a STEM profession. The career activities create space for youth to think about their own career interests and research the skills involved in those careers. The mentors share about their career pathways and inspire youth to think about how a career in STEM can help their community. It is absolutely incredible how much I am learning about our own community and how one career has this whole different path because when I grew up I was these kids and I didn't know that there was all of these options. Before this week at having like a soccer player or carpenter I'm starting to build up trying to be a guy that like works with sensors. We've seen the mentors have an influence on how these youth see STEM in their world. Many of them have shared that they want to have a career that helps people that makes a difference. They now see STEM as a way to do that. I think it's important for kids to get involved in this type of program because there are so many different kinds of STEM careers that that kids can get into especially in our community.