CALDWELL, Texas (KRHD) — The Texas A&M Engineering SPARK! program introduced Caldwell students to robotics and STEM Thursday as part of the Harrie P. Woodson Memorial Library's summer reading program.
- The Texas A&M Engineering program SPARK! is travelling across Texas to introduce students to STEM.
- Caldwell students in grades K-6 practiced with basic coding and robotics and learned about engineering majors offered at Texas A&M.
- Program Specialists Trudi Skinner and Robert Hoyuela says starting education young sparks interest to satisfy the growing engineering industry, which is projected to have nearly 200,000 job positions open each year.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
For Arley Campbell and her brother Raley, playing around with robots is nothing new.
"Well, I'm kind of used to working with robots," Arley said.
But not with these kinds of robots —
"I've never played with robots," Raley said.
But they're expanding her knowledge at Texas A&M Engineering's traveling STEM program — SPARK!
"Yeah, a big part of what we do is making sure that we give them a good education and computational thinking, so being able to think through a process and come up with these steps and what we call algorithms or like our programming language," Program Specialist Robert Hoyuela said.
It's one reason their grandma Melissa is signing them up.
Arley had already taken some in school this year, so I thought it would be really exciting, and Raley — I figured he would really love it, Melissa Campbell said.
The engineering industry is growing with nearly 200,000 jobs are expected to open each year nationally while Texasremains one of the top engineer employers.
"As manufacturing increases, we're trying to bring more factories and businesses to Texas, so as that manufacturing increases, we need more engineers to fill those roles, so they figured start at a younger age — spark that interest, like Robert said, and then hopefully we end up with more engineers," Trudi Skinner, a program specialist said.
Future engineers like Arley who's thinking of a career in the field.
"I thought about it. I thought I might want to work on cars," Arley said.
