Announcing our new STEMarts Apprenticeship program, designed for women/girls from Northern New Mexico (ages 14-20) and launched in 2022 thanks to a 2-yr Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation Education Enrichment grant. Congratulations to our winners! Amelia Martinez, Dominique Vigil, Feliciana Gonzales, Megan Odom and Svetlana Backhaus. We also welcomed an congratulate Jade Rael as this year’s Apprentice mentor. This position was sponsored through the Taos Pueblo Education and Training Division Apprenticeship program for native residents of Taos County. Jade is a first year student at UCLA, participates in all the programming, and has initiated a new STEMarts Lab Podcast series which she will lead in collaboration with the apprentices.
Apprentices discover and develop their creative interests and gain valuable work skills. They experience cutting edge science and technology as part of professional STEMarts events. Apprentices become part of the international Space Messengers team, receive a $1000 stipend for the year, and customized training in STEAM areas including; programming, webdesign, XR/Metaverse design, projection mapping, data visualization, interactive design, and ArcGIS storymapping.
Our first cohort of STEMarts Apprentices just completed their first quarter and are rocking it. In this short time frame they have created their own websites and started monthly blog posts after an awesome virtual 3-day workshop led by Jennifer Case-Nevarrez, Community Learning Network (CLN), Santa Fe. They learned from John Di Ruggiero (CLN) how to use ArcGIS software to design geo-tagged StoryMaps and they have been getting up to speed on the STEMarts space-themed curriculum in preparation for Space Messengers, an international Mixed Reality traveling installation that aims to expand our relationship to the universe and our identify as planetary citizens. Next venue for Space Messengers: The PASEO Festival on September 15,16, 2022.
For the second quarter they form teams to work on their own STEAM projects and we provide the training and support they need to make it happen. Check out their websites below to see these projects evolve and to learn more about the STEMarts Apprentices in their own words.