STEM

The Career Connected Learning (CCL) Department at Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) is funding its educators to take workshops and become members at FUSE. The goal of this endeavor is for teachers to learn skills that they can bring back to their schools, enhancing STEAM education throughout the district. More than 70 educators have taken advantage of the initiative. 

Inez Jacobs, a science and STEM educator at Mark Armijo Academy, is one of those educators. She has her students design and build Leopold benches as an applied way to teach blueprint reading and making precise measurements. “Students learn basic construction math essential to the building and construction industries,” says Inez. Once students have laid out their benches, Inez brings the materials to FUSE, where she cuts them on the chopsaw and engraves them with the CNC router. They then place the benches on their campus so that people have comfortable and attractive places to sit.

Shannyn Pareo incorporates FUSE into her pedagogy as well. Her entrepreneurship students at Desert Ridge Middle School create their own businesses. They design logos and come up with taglines. Shannyn prints stickers with their logos at FUSE, which “they stick in inappropriate places all over the school,” she admits.

In addition to entrepreneurship, Shannyn teaches math, CAD, manufacturing, web development, and coding. She started teaching Adobe Illustrator after learning it at FUSE. “It’s exciting for them to see how things are built…just to start being exposed to what the possibilities are at such a young age puts them ahead in design,” she says of her students. One, now at La Cueva High School, took what he learned in Shannyn’s class and is using it to design prosthetic limbs. Another is participating in a design challenge for which he’ll use a CNC router to create a picture frame that doubles as a nightlight with a hidden drawer. 

It isn’t just classroom teachers using FUSE. Christy Snell works in APS’ Educational Technology Department. She helps elementary schools throughout the district set up digital learning spaces and makerspaces. She has taken several FUSE workshops and reverse engineered them to be appropriate for elementary school aged children, using resources that teachers have available. After taking FUSE’s Intro to Screenprinting, she developed a similar activity using brayers and Scratch-Foam. For 3D printing, she first exposes students to things that have been made with a 3D printer. In subsequent grades, they start doing their own design with Tinkercad. Sometimes she’ll start with a design challenge, inviting the students to figure out what equipment they’ll need to use, whether it’s a laser, a 3D printer, or something else. “If this is something they like to do, then there are ways to move forward with that,” Snell says, talking about the opportunities students have to work at Explora’s X Studio, then FUSE, as they grow.

“The CCL is spreading STEAM skills across the curriculum from K through 12, so we made these FUSE workshops available to any teacher in the district who wanted to incorporate these skills into their classrooms,” says Amy Traylor, the CCL Program Development Specialist who made the funding available. “After they attend the training courses, we work to find them the equipment they need to share those skills with their students. The response to this initiative has been enormously positive and we really appreciate having an amazing community resource like FUSE as a partner to get teachers and students ready for the jobs of tomorrow.”