A Pre-Kindergarten - Grade 12 co-educational independent day school in Westchester County, New York

STEAM

Inspiring innovation, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
 

Rye Country Day’s commitment to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) enables the School to remain a forward-thinking institution that is poised to explore the breadth, depth, and interaction of science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics, unlocking the limitless potential of students as they pursue these disciplines. We provide collaborative learning experiences that strengthen creative and critical thinking, build new skill sets, and spark the imagination needed to design, create, and to solve real-world problems.
 

Program Highlights

STEAM Director

Cathie Bischoff

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The Makerspace

The Makerspace serves as a hub of creativity and invention on campus, featuring a wide range of engineering materials and manufacturing equipment. 

 

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The Innovation Lab

This Upper School STEM-focused lab supports Rye Country Day’s curricular offerings in key 21st-century fields, including design, computer science, computational biology, science research, biotechnology, experimental physics, and engineering.

STEAM in the Curriculum

 

Lower School

Students learn and work across disciplines including art, technology, science, and math to complete innovative projects. These projects cultivate and strengthen their abilities to think creatively and collaborate as they synthesize various STEAM concepts through fun, tangible products such as building lights, robots, homes, amusement park rides, and lego structures, among others. The result is wildly curious young learners who are eager to try new things to understand new, exciting concepts.

 

Middle School

Middle School faculty collaborate across disciplines to teach units that highlight the intersection of STEAM within the curriculum, from the humanities to the sciences and fine arts. Taking to the Makerspace to explore and test ideas, Middle School students utilize technology and take ownership over their workspace and their role within a collaboration and final product. Middle School students also have the choice of a number of electives and after-school offerings to pursue STEAM projects that are exciting and meaningful to them. Examples of STEAM in the Middle School include seventh graders constructing shadow boxes to tell the story of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” using 3D Science; eighth graders designing and building musical instruments to demonstrate their understanding of mechanical waves, particularly sound waves; sixth grade Roboticists building competition-ready Sumo Bots; and fifth grade history students making clay carvings, using the ancient Sumerian alphabet.

 

Upper School

STEAM enables students to be courageous, innovative thinkers who are able to adapt to new technologies and frameworks to meet current and evolving challenges. Supported by their foundation of knowledge and skills, Upper School students have the flexibility, and agency enable to pursue disciplinary projects is specific areas of interest. They develop and hone their skills in project management and independent work, and they graduate with the ability to explore new ideas, solve problems, and lead and work within teams. Examples of STEAM in Upper School include building functional hands out of cardboard, string, and other everyday materials as part of a biology unity on anatomy; constructing and operating tournament-winning robots; conducting groundbreaking research on water quality; and creating 3D-printed art with relevance to history and literature.

STEAM Video Spotlights

Lower School

Each year, fourth graders participate in an interdisciplinary, months-long process that results in a demonstration of robots they build themselves. After learning about the engineering design process, they construct robots and an environment and code their robots in computer class. 

Middle School

The Organization of Life comic strip project is the culmination of the “Is It Living?” unit in seventh-grade life science. In this project students create a visual representation of their understanding of living versus non-living organisms.

Upper School

Ninth grade biology students had an opportunity to alter genes in E.coli to influence the function of their proteins. Specifically, they introduced a mutation into the lacZ gene with the CRISPR-Cas9 system, resulting resulted in color changes they could visualize.