Phenix City’s $3 million STEM center shows investment is paying dividends

Seventh-grader Cardova Hall has a simple way to explain how the complex called Dyer Family STEM Center has improved the education at Phenix City Intermediate School.

“When you’re at the STEM center,” said Cardova, 12, “it’s a lot more fun and easier to learn, a better environment.”

Then he added, “It’s expensive, too, but it helps kids learn and be prepared for the future.”

Two years after the center opened, Phenix City Schools students and staff say the $3 million investment is paying dividends at PCIS, which serves students in grades 6 and 7. And they have the academic, behavior and enrollment evidence to prove it.

A progress monitoring tool the school system uses is called Star Math from Renaissance, a Wisconsin-based learning analytics company. In 2016-17, the STEM center’s first school year, PCIS students averaged 1 year and 7 months of academic growth on the Star Math assessment. In 2017-18, that average was 1 year and 4 months.

“Any time you’re able to accomplish (more than one year) growth,” said PCIS principal Bobby Cook, “that’s huge.”

Cook also believes the STEM center has helped his school decrease by 50-55 percent the number of students who failed a core subject during a marking period.

The PCIS enrollment has grown from 958 students in 2016-17 to 1,053 last school year and 1,124 this school year, Cook said — an increase of 17 percent in two years.

“That tells me we have a program that is enticing to students, most importantly, but that also our community and our parents are buying into it,” Cook said. “Three years ago, we started this endeavor to make Phenix City Schools a premier school district. That increase in enrollment is letting me know our parents and our stakeholders are getting that message and believe that it is premier.”

But the increased enrollment didn’t increase behavior problems.

“They’ve actually decreased,” he said.

Compared to 2015-16, the number of students receiving a discipline referral decreased by 33 percent in 2016-17 and by 16 percent in 2017-18.

“I’m extremely proud of the faculty with the way they have really bought into what we’re trying to do here and what they’ve done to show this type of progress,” Cook said.

“It’s a shift in culture,” said Phenix City superintendent Randy Wilkes. “You change the expectation of the students. You give them impact for learning. They understand they’re going to use this at the collegiate level, postsecondary level, where it’s going to help them in their career, and then all of a sudden it has meaning. When you have meaning, you have intentional relevance.”

And fun.

Wilkes gushed about watching the students in a sumo robot competition.

“Ah, you talk about fun, I mean, they were shaking and trembling,” Wilkes said.

The STEM center features these learning areas:

▪ The Synovus Engineering Lab is completely Web-based and enables students to design, simulate and analyze objects such as structures, rockets and prosthetics.

▪ The Aflac Digital Media Lab allows students to use print, text, audio, video and the Internet to communicate with multiple audiences.

▪ The Phenix City Education Foundation Chattahoochee River System Lab combines the elements of an aquarium and a terrarium to produce a habitat where plants, animals and microorganisms interact in ecological balance.

▪ The Phenix City Education Foundation Saltwater Aquarium teaches students about fish anatomy, the food chain, the water cycle and the nitrogen cycle.

▪ The TSYS Coding Lab shows students how to make and import objects and create recordings to develop interactive projects. Seventh-graders learn drone technology through JavaScript.

▪ The WestRock Virtual Science Lab allows students to perform more than 270 different kinds of dissections.

▪ The Dr. Stephen Cooper Imaginarium includes exhibits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Smithsonian Institution, allowing students to virtually explore the world and the universe through the Magic Planet, a digital video globe.

▪ The Cable TV of East Alabama Interactive Atrium contains anatomy, health and weather exhibits.

Because of the increased enrollment, Wilkes said, the LEGO robotics class was moved from the eighth grade at South Girard School to the sixth grade at PCIS.

Caitlyn Hall, another PCIS seventh-grade but not related to Cardova Hall, said her favorite activity in the STEM center has been in the virtual reality science lab. With VR glasses from California technology company zSpace, she examined the digestive system in three dimensions.

“That was like really exciting and thrilling for me,” she said. “. . . It was cool because it was coming out of the screen at me. It was almost like I could touch it.”

Caitlyn, 12, said she learned the digestive system better in the STEM center than in a regular classroom because the interactive technology made her “more interested in it.”

For the public, the most visible evidence of the STEM center’s impact was last Friday night in a pregame demonstration before Central High School’s football game at Garrett-Harrison Stadium. Three dozen PCIS students flew the miniature drones they built and programmed while Central’s “mother drone” filmed the exhibition and showed it on the stadium’s jumbotron.

The plastic mini-drones weigh less than 1 pound and can fit in one hand. When they fly together, their buzz sounds like a swarm of bees. The drones can do flips and barrel rolls, based on the computer commands the students programmed and the iPad controls in their hands.

Preparing the drones for their flights, Caitlyn said, “sometimes got a little hectic in the classroom. Somebody got a drone stuck in their hair.”

All PCIS students have lessons in the STEM center for 30 minutes each school day, rotating every nine weeks through one of the five labs: virtual reality science, engineering, robotics, computer coding and digital media. For example, in the engineering lab, the sixth-graders build glider airplanes and the seventh-graders build mousetrap cars.

Angel Wilson, the center’s facilitator, said, “There are no other STEM centers that we have been able to find that provide an opportunity for every student every day. There are other STEM centers in the nation, of course, that are going to give you the ability to have an elite group to come to the STEM center or a paid afterschool program, but this is a public school setting with every student every day.”

The drone program is part of the school system’s computer coding progression. In prekindergarten through fifth grade at the elementary schools, students learn coding in SmartLabs.

“Our preschool kids are actually coding,” Wilson said. “They’re learning how to maneuver small robots.”

At PCIS, sixth-graders continue using the block-based coding they learned in elementary school. That interface allows the students to develop computer programs by simply dragging and dropping puzzle blocks to represent complex programming constructs and commands. Then, in seventh grade through high school, they learn script coding, which requires the knowledge of computing languages to perform certain functions.

High school students may opt for Advanced Placement computer courses in grades 10 and 11, and 12th-graders may participate in a new course developed in conjunction with TSYS.

Mark Rice, 706-576-6272, @MarkRiceLE.