Volunteers put the finishing touches this week on a new STEM center in Orange Mound, giving kids as young as elementary school age free access to engineering, robotics, and coding tools. The center, housed at Red Zone Ministries, was made possible by the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation and the Tennessee Valley Authority. “As they even go into high school, they’re going into their classrooms knowing these very important concepts that they have been exposed to at such an early age,” said Althea Jones, TVA’s director of stakeholder and community engagement.
The center hasn’t opened yet, but the same partnership has already brought coding and circuitry tools to the Orange Mound Library, where kids can experiment with a 3D printer for free. “It’s just the spark for them,” said librarian Caitlin Prilliman. “They can start using that creativity that every child has and maybe, just maybe, create something wildly unique and useful.”
The push is showing up in classrooms too. At Maxine Smith STEAM Academy, middle schoolers recently built paper structures engineered to hold up five textbooks. “You can see it on paper, you can read about it, but until you actually touch and feel it and breathe it, it doesn’t connect,” said Melanie Lynch, the school’s STEM and math teacher and a former engineer. “A lot of children don’t have that exposure.”
