SPENCERVILLE, Ohio (WLIO) - After Charles River Laboratories made a $10,000 donation to Spencerville Schools, students have been able to participate in more STEM-related activities through specialized classes.
This has lead to these students getting an idea of what concepts are involved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and some of the career options that they could have after high school. We asked some of these students about their classes and the activities they do in them.
"There's coding and you have to aim [mini robot balls], then you tell it what to do," said Jase Roberts, a fifth grader. "You code it specifically so it doesn't go off course, but if it does, you have to recode them and re-aim them."
"That's very fun to get to have stuff to do, have stuff to use, like products that we're able to use," said Mason Marraccini, an eighth grader.
"With the drones, it's a lot of coding and figuring out and what the drones can do - it's very fun," Gauge McElroy, an eighth grader. "Once you do it for a while, you start to figure out what you do, and I really love it. I'm glad we have it for our school, it's very fun to learn, and now, something I'd like to do after school."
Staff at Spencerville say that they are delighted to offer these opportunities for their students, as not every school has this kind of equipment. That just means more chances to spark an interest in a STEM-related career one day.
"We have to provide these opportunities for the kids, because this is the thing that they're going to have to know how to do to be able to be employable when it comes to the future, especially with the robotics, with the drones, with the automation of everything, being able to learn basic computer programming, even at a higher level that we get into in our high school, gives them more opportunities than if we were not able to offer this," said Mike Graham, technology teacher for Spencerville.
This is not the first donation that Charles River has made to their local school district, and they add that bolstering stem classes for area students is just part of their community outreach.
"We've been really been here since 1976, we've been in the community for a long, long time, and we really want to see this community grow as long as our business grows, too," said Rusty Rush, site director for Charles River Laboratories Spencerville.
