Building an appreciation of STEM

Kyle Knutson, Jennifer Jones and Gabe Muilenburg work together to build a robot out of Lego building blocks and electronic components as the fourth graders participate in a robotics club Thursday afternoon at East Elementary School. The after-school program is focused on promoting STEM, which is short for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Faith Miskin and Jaedyn Redd react as their robot responds to commands programmed into it from a Chrome computer tablet. Members of the club are given a fictitious scenario such as an earthquake or flood and then build a robot or other device to respond to these simulated emergencies.