Ten-year-old Nahzir can talk endlessly about video games – especially Minecraft, a game that teaches children how to construct new worlds, giving them a sense of the spatial awareness that is so crucial to the engineering profession.
Nahzir and his friends were first introduced to Minecraft when they began attending an afterschool program at the Boys and Girls Club in Newark where they featured workshops and extensive training in Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology (STEM).
According to Boys and Girls Club officials, The STEM room is filled with Samsung tablets programmed with games that push our members to think about the world in an integrated fashion using math, science, and technology.
Marie Redell, the club's STEM educator explained, “It’s not just about the individual subjects, it is about how children can use principles from all the STEM fields together to come up with real solutions to so many of the problems we face in the world today.”
Recently, Redell rigorous lessons challenged members to come up with a STEM-based solution to a problem that they have witnessed in their community of Newark.
Nahzir and his two friends, Vaughn and Detres, decided that they wanted to address a rodent infestation in some parts of the city.
The group of young boys envisioned a robotic snake that could be programmed to eat rats, without harming humans officials said.
Nahzir and his friends went on to build a cardboard model of this snake, and make a stop-motion film that explained the process by which the snake would deal with the rat-problem. As the children continue to advance their skills in robotics, Nahzir hopes to build a functional robotic snake – even if it isn’t quite ready to eat rats just yet!
Nahzir, pausing to reflect on his STEM experience says, “STEM taught me how I could help the world.” He elaborated, “I want to learn how to build apps. I want to build a game that shows a brave warrior helping out average citizens so that people can learn from him.”
New Jersey, meet Nahzir.