An afterschool STEM program at Gladstone Elementary School designed to match up small groups of students with mentors for a months-long program meeting once weekly has received such an overwhelming response that a waitlist was created.

That, too, filled quickly, reaching almost two-dozen students – the same amount that enrolled in the program.

The original program allowed groups of four students to be matched up with one of several mentors from local high schools and from within the Cranston community.

Principal Susan Buonanno took one look at the waitlist and knew she had to come up with something.

“I knew those kids would never get into the program,” she said. “It was full. They’d never get the chance to participate.”

She took the LEGO toolkit home and put together some of the projects herself over a weekend to see just what was involved and to try to come up with an outside-the-box solution.

“It was so much fun. I knew that all the kids would love it, and I knew I had to figure out how to get more students involved so that they could get the experiences of using the technology and working as a team, too,” she said.

After speaking with Caitlyn Blankenship, community engagement specialist at CCAP and program organizer, a solution was created.

“We decided to find the funding to pay a second teacher to work with the extra 20 students once a week,” Buonanno said. “Our technology teacher for the building will work with the kids after school along with a teacher assistant for eight weeks.”

The second group of students will participate in a shorter, slightly modified version of the program, but will be using the same materials and doing the same creative engineering activities, which involve using LEGOs to create rockets and robots and other types of moving models before working together to pick their own problem to solve and project to create based on what they’ve learned in the program so far.

“They pick team names and they choose a problem from their studies of the moon, whether it has to do with water on the moon or energy or air on the moon, and they work together to test their solution,” Blakenship said. “They create a poster to market their solution and then in May there is an expo where they show it all.”

“The second program is a slightly condensed program, but I’m thrilled,” Buonanno said. “I am glad we’re running a STEM mentoring program here and I’m glad that so many of our students wanted to participate. We were able to take this program and springboard off of it to create our own mini-version, a Gladstone STEM program.”