STEM Night 2023: Return Back to the Cafeteria!
STEM Night is a yearly event held by the Cresskill High School Robotics Team – the CouGEARS. It is a team composed of about less than twenty students with two teachers, Mr. Cardenas and Ms. Milewska. There’s a total of four teams – building, design, programming, and marketing. Although the main premise of the team is to participate in competitions held in Bergen County and later in the state, STEM Night is the team’s final event at the end of each school year. It serves as a last way the departing seniors of the team can contribute.
The main goal of the event is to educate elementary schoolers and inform them about CouGEARS that they can join in their high school years! This year, the team successfully went to the two elementary schools and gave a presentation about STEM Night and the robotics team – a visit that had to stop because of COVID-19.
It has been four years since 2023 STEM Night returned to Cresskill High School! Last year, 2022, STEM Night had to be held in Bryan elementary school due to the school flooding. Therefore, the team was able to do more hands-on activities, like testing surface tensions on pennies with colored dye! There were also other clubs like the Environmental Club and the National Art Honor Society.
Mr. Cardenas exclaimed: “Family STEM Night was a great success and It was great to be able to run this event at the High School again. We had hundreds of families from Cresskill attend, with close to 250 students from the elementary, making this one of our largest events in recent years.
According to one parent, they brought their child to STEM Night to “get my child more involved in STEM activities and this is a really great opportunity, as the older Cresskill members are giving back to their younger citizens.” Another remembered the STEM Night from before COVID-19: “I remember my high school child loving this when she was back in elementary school, so I’m glad it’s back at the high school again!”
The most widely said of the remarks from the elementary schoolers was: “I loved the robots!” Unlike last year, the entire room of A2 was dedicated to showcasing robots! There was a robot driver station, a circular bot, automatic Lego bots, and the very team robot that would go out in competitions.
All the funds go directly to the robotics team! If you missed it this year, it will also be held next year near the same time so keep a close eye!
We were happy to see all the children in the community having fun doing STEM activities, and even happier to see how many high school students came out to volunteer for the event. Next year we hope to have more science and art clubs get involved and make it even bigger and better!”
— Mr. Cardenas
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