This summer, Landon, Ryan, Zayne and Larson, all from Windsor, joined elementary school students from across the country to take part in an academic and career-oriented development experience, the National Youth Leadership Forum (NYLF): Pathways to STEM. NYLF Pathways to STEM is one of the Envision by WorldStrides family of programs that enable students to explore their interests and experience learning beyond the classroom.
All four boys are entering fifth grade this fall and attend Windsor Christian Academy. Each was nominated by their teacher to attend this prestigious forum after demonstrating continuous academic excellence.
Traditionally, this annual forum is offered at UC Berkeley, however was moved to San Jose due to campus COVID-19 restrictions. Despite the location change, the curriculum remained the same and included leadership training, critical thinking, collaboration, communication and goal setting. During their journey, the boys were tasked with a multitude of challenges using STEM training they acquired in medicine, engineering and CSI.
The forum offered many highlights which included participating in a specialized curriculum created by professors in the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine where they learned to care for broken bones, learned about the respiratory system and built model lungs to understand how the lungs function and how diseases of the lung negatively impact the ability to work properly. They learned about the cardiovascular system and dissected a beef heart.Â
As part of their engineering challenge, each participant built their own robot, learned about the architecture of truss bridges and programmed their robot to cross the bridge they designed and built. The boys were a part of a larger team at the forum, and together they helped build an amusement park ride complete with its own motor circuit. Each team contributed a ride, and together the entire group built an amusement park.
