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Students at Southside Elementary are wrapping up a two-week camp for science, technology, engineering, art and math with a camp-wide “Olympics.”

The “Olympics” follow students’ lessons on geography and cultures around the world, among other lessons including hydraulics, robotics, automatons and other STEAM projects while working in small groups.

The camp is the summer extension of Southside’s STEAM SmartLab, the first of its kind in the state. This is the fourth year the school has held the camp, said Lynette Leonard, the STEAM SmartLab facilitator, and the first year that it’s been extended to Kootenai and Farmin elementary schools.

Leonard, the organizer of the camp, is trying to fight against this typical consequence of summer vacation 一 the “summer slide” that tends to happen when students are out of school.

It’s especially valuable this year as teachers work to address the learning gaps that developed due to shortened or missed school days and online learning, she said.

Students get excited when they’re able to overcome new obstacles and create something themselves, said Lorraine Gee, the CCLC program director at Farmin Elementary.

“When they actually start working, they are like, ‘I can't do this. It's too hard.’ And they have to get pushed through that threshold,” she said. “And then that success of ‘I did it,’ like, they couldn’t believe it. So really empowering them to go beyond what they thought that they could, they're learning a lot of different fundamental [skills].”

The camp is open to students in grades 1-7, and offers a low-stress opportunity to learn about STEAM basics while having fun, Leonard said. The camp also helped students learn to collaborate on projects, and keeps students engaged.

Thursday morning, students at Southside Elementary sat on the floor of the gymnasium, guiding robotic turtles they had built themselves with flashlights across the floor.

Students also get to take projects they built home, Leonard said. Younger students brought home educational pamphlets with materials on the countries they studied and recipes for each country 一 Taziki sauce for Greece, for instance.

The curriculum, built by Leonard, is catered to students’ grade levels. The older students focused more on robotics, hydraulic and building models, while the first- and second-graders were engrossed in architecture and tales of folklore.

Sam Hewitt, who will be entering second grade this fall, was appointed team leader by the classmates in his group. The second-grader spoke without hesitation as he guided his classmates through a YouTube video tutorial to make “friction climbers” of string and wooden spiders, sloths and lizards.

Leonard’s curriculum gave the teachers rein to follow where the students' curiosity led, said instructor Norajean Lemar.

“She put her heart and soul in this and it shows,” Lemar said. “We're never sitting here going, ‘What am I gonna do next?’ I'm sitting there going, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn't get to this, there wasn’t enough time.’ [Leonard] gives us so much to learn, so much to do. And the kids just love it. She does amazing work.”

Lemar, who started work at Southside this year, previously worked at another school-based summer camp, and said Southside’s STEAM camp was the "most organized summer school" she’s ever worked at.

Students like Hewitt love learning, she said. They “blossom” when they get to camp.

“[Sam is] going on vacation tomorrow, and he is so bummed he doesn’t get to be here,” she said.

Several students said they especially enjoyed the cultural lessons that came with the different countries they learned about. Others said they liked robotics. Most students said their projects at camp had inspired them to try more of what they had done in the future.

One hope of the camp, Leonard said, is to open students up early to the possibilities of STEAM, and eventually to careers they might like. Idaho lags behind many other states in both K-12 funding and achievement. The camp is part of her effort, on a local level, to bridge the gap.

“Even this camp helps [students] pursue it more,” she said. “We see even in schools that don't have [SmartLabs], once they get that exposure they want more. And for them to be competitive with the rest of the nation, they have to do that. They have to get those skills. And if we don't offer it in summer camp or at school, they're not going to be competitive with the rest of the nation, because a lot of other states have already been teaching this for 10 or 15 years.”

Alyssa Porter, a sixth-grader, said her favorite part of camp was the turtle robots, and getting the chance to play outside.

Abbey Lough, a seventh-grader, was so inspired by building a model of the Tower of Pisa at camp, that her next goal is to build a bigger model. A six-foot model, to be exact. This is Lough's second year at Southside's STEAM camp and she is already doing what she can to hone her studies so she can be an engineer one day.

Another seventh-grader, Caitlin Gambrill, said she found the robotics and engineering projects challenging, but after facing these difficulties she began to enjoy the challenge.

"I make a lot of mistakes, but I am learning from them," she said.

To fund the summer camp, and the SmartLab, Leonard turned to grant writing 一 an intensive, and tedious process.

This year’s camp was funded by a grant from the Panhandle Alliance for Education, and a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning Center program.

Although everyone at the district would love to expand the SmartLabs and STEAM camps even more, securing the funding is a big challenge that will take time, Gee said.

“It's just a matter of finding the funding, and the person really able to go, ‘I want to take that on,’” she said. “So [Leonard’s program] being the flagship and taking it on, my hope is we’ll see [more growth]. Things are kind of crazy right now. So it's hard to say how we're gonna proceed, but we definitely see parents loving it.”

The biggest powerhouse behind the camps, though, is the teachers, Gee said. Many come in early and stay late, even during the summer break, and do more than they’re paid for to make sure students have every opportunity.

“We've got some seasoned staff, people that keep on coming back every year [and] showing up because they love it, and they believe in it,” she said. “Without them, really, we wouldn't have anything to offer.”