SANDPOINT — School may have ended earlier this month, but learning never stops in the Lake Pend Oreille School District.

Farmin-Stidwell and Kootenai elementary schools teamed up to keep the education — and fun — going a bit longer this summer, with two weeks of “Getting STEM Crazy,” as was printed on the T-shirts.

“The goal of our camp is to encourage students to find solutions, to fail, to try again, to plan, to think outside the box, to go back to the drawing board and find a different approach, to work together, to think creatively, and to come to a conclusion that they are proud of and can thoughtfully explain,“ said Betsy Dalessio, Farmin-Stidwell assistance principal and director of the LPOSD’s 21st Century Community Learning program.

This is the first year of the two-week LPOSD Summer STEM Camp, created as an extension of the 21st Century after-school program. The district was awarded a five-year grant in 2018 to implement the program at Farmin-Stidwell and Kootenai to provide academic support, enrichment and activities. The grant requires the district to offer summer programming. Based on feedback from parents, kids “love” STEM, Dalessio said, so they decided to put on the camp, which started last week with 40 students, and continues this week with 58 kids in grades one through six.

The camp is funded by a $10,000 grant from the Idaho STEM Action Center, and a $5,000 grant from Panhandle Alliance for Education. The grants paid for six drones, curriculum, simple machines, an aerodynamics kit for building gliders and rockets, Zoolab Legos for the younger kids, T-shirts for all the kids and staffing. Dalessio wrote another grant to get six more drones for the fall, in hopes it will translate into a drone club when school starts.

In addition to the drones, simple machines and other activities mentioned, the camp included coding and robotics, a “Pirate Camp,” where the kids learn about knots and other nautical ideas, as well as a Traveling Artist art kit. They made teepees, Aztec masks, dragons and other items with the art kit, Dalessio said. All of the topics have real-world application, she said, as academic research shows that through an integrated approach to STEM education — focused on real-world, authentic problems — students learn to reflect on the problem-solving process.

“By exposure alone, we are giving our students a glimpse into fields they have never heard of, showing them what hands-on learning and creative engineering looks like, and offering them a chance to dream about their future in ways they might have never knew existed otherwise,” she said. “Our daily STEM challenges require teamwork, creativity, ingenuity, and problem solving skills to complete successfully.”

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.