By Sarah Meiselman
On March 15, 2023, North Springs hosted the 13th annual STEAM showcase. It is organized by the Sandy Springs Education Force, a nonprofit organization with a mission to create targeted programs that educate, inspire, and prepare public school students in Sandy Springs for the competitive workforce. The Sandy Springs Education Force works to support and raise money for all the public schools in Sandy Springs to provide students with mentoring, STEAM, and literacy programs that the school district is unable to undertake on its own.
The purpose of the STEAM showcase is both to give recognition to company sponsors that donate money to public school STEAM programs and to show off those sponsors to students to educate them on potential career options. Irene Schweiger, the executive director of the event, along with other Sandy Springs education board members, seek out companies, typically local ones, to donate money, which is used for grants to be given to after-school STEAM clubs. For example, one sponsor at the event was Comcast, and it funds a lot of North Springs’s robotics club, and another was SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design, and students were able go to SCAD’s table at the showcase and learn about the opportunities the college offers to its students. The top three sponsors of the event are Mercedes-Benz, State Farm, and the RangeWater Impact Foundation.
Miriam Salpeter, the Marketing and Communications Director of the STEAM showcase, said, “The idea is to be able to present an opportunity to students to ask questions to companies involved in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. Companies can showcase what they do. We have architecture firms, a firm dealing with wind energy, Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital with their surgical robotics equipment, and more at the event. It gives students the opportunity to see all the different kinds of work they might do in the future.”
Mr. Hanson, the principal of North Springs, said “Every student at North Springs has the opportunity to come through the STEAM showcase and see the exhibits and the things that might pique their interest in a career later on, and the exhibits teach them the ways they might go about doing one of those careers.”
The event is also meaningful because sponsors can see the impact that their donations have had on students. At the evening event, also held at North Springs on March 15th, students, mostly in elementary school, showed off what they have learned using the money donated by company sponsors. They operated their robots, drones, and other technologies and presented projects that they have built in various school clubs, such as the Art, Drones, Engineering, and Entrepreneur Clubs and the Lego STEM club. There were seven elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools from Sandy Springs invited to this event.
The STEAM showcase started in 2010, with a member of the Sandy Springs board of education who had ties with NASA and saw the need for a STEAM event for students in the area. The board invited Dr. Robert Satcher, an astronaut who had just come off a space shuttle. He spoke at schools in Sandy Springs. Then, in the auxiliary gym at North Springs, the board set up an exhibit sent by the Houston Space Center that had an original space suit, moon boots, a planetarium, and more. Dr. Satcher spoke to students from North Springs, as well as others who came on busses from other nearby schools. The event also had about five other exhibits created by a few different companies. The STEAM showcase was a huge hit and has grown to a point where it now contains 37 exhibits, the most it has ever had.
Without North Springs, the STEAM showcase would not be able to continue. Schweiger said, “We really appreciate the support we get from North Springs High School and have gotten for the last 13 years. There is no way we could bring something like this in without the support of the staff, custodians, and the whole board of North Springs.”
