Middle School STEM Connections Conference
Nearly 400 middle school students and teachers are expected to attend the third annual Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Connections Conference.
The focus of the STEM Connections Conference is to duplicate the experience of a professional scientific conference and to give students an opportunity to show off their research. The program will also include chemistry and physics demonstrations by UMass Amherst faculty.
The conference is a collaboration between the UMass STEM Education Institute and several area middle schools, funded by the National Science Foundation’s GK-12 program.
The STEM Connections program brings UMass graduate students and faculty into area classrooms in an effort to increase youth awareness and participation in science and to encourage students to consider science as a possible career choice. The graduate students help middle schoolers design and carry out their own experiments.