The Wellesley High School students who offer classes to elementary school students through Kickstart STEM are a techie lot well equipped to teach remotely, as they’ve done for free during the school shutdown forced by COVID-19. But they’d much rather be teaching in person.
Gael Hyppolite, who started the program in Spring of 2018 with classmates Andrew Dunbar and Tristan Martello, loves having kids compete with each other to engage with science technology engineering & math (STEM). He describes the scramble instigated among kids during the last day of a 2019 summer workshop in which they were tasked with building the best possible parachute for an egg using recycled materials.
“We had all our materials placed in two large boxes at the front of the room, but instead of distributing them amongst the groups we told each kid to remain seated until we began the timer,” he says. “Of course, it was chaos the moment we started the timer, with all the kids fighting like animals to get their hands on the materials they needed.”
Hyppolite and his crew (also including Aditya Acharya) converted Kickstart STEM into a business last November and offer classes in general STEM as well as programming languages Scratch and Python via Wellesley Rec for $50 per 6-week program. They and other students have been teaching about 60 kids per season. Scratch, because of its simplicity, has been most popular as a programming introduction.
“We wanted to share our love for STEM and provide kids with our own perspectives on why these fields are so great,” Hyppolite says of Kickstart STEM’s origins.
New online courses are now being offered via Wellesley Rec for small groups to ensure interactivity. When registering, note activity #s: STEM is 322997, Scratch is 322999, and Python is 322998.
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