Students Show Off Creativity at STREAM Faire
Posted on 04/26/2023
In the most all-encompassing event of its kind to-date at St. Thomas Aquinas High School, the STREAM Faire invited students of all interests to create and display their work for an audience of classmates, grammar schoolers, teachers, and parents.

STREAM (Science-Technology-Religion-Engineering-Arts-Math) Faire is a rebranding of the Makerfaire, an event now in its fifth year, intended to showcase an even wider variety of student creativity and talents. Projects on display included a life-sized model of a Star Wars Starfighter, metal statues made with a metal forge, hardware-modified Wii consoles that allow multiplayer gaming on multiple screens, a Scoville (spiciness) testing stand, robotics demonstrations, and more.

“The STREAM Faire was a great success,” noted STEM Director Mr. Mike Lewon. “We opened the scopes so that people from all subjects could be able to participate and the students seemed to have really enjoyed planning for it. It was challenging with all the logistics, especially when we brought in the elementary school students, but everything went smoothly, and it looks like everybody had a lot of fun.”

The numerous indoor and outdoor events that attendees enjoyed so greatly were months, if not years, in the making. Junior and STEM Vice President Sandra Abrantes first became inspired during her freshman year upon seeing all the workshops that the STEM program offered. “I decided to join the STEM program, which opened up a lot of opportunities to be in the lab and learn all of the machinery. I work with Le Forge and all the machines in the dust room of the lab, and now I am the Vice President of the STEM program.”

Beyond inspiration gleaned from the workshops offered in the STEM lab throughout the year, other students were inspired by personal interests such as fashion and gaming. John Schilp, Nick Basilico, Michael Hary, and Brandon Gafanhao had a love for Wii gaming that led them to modify a Wii console to allow gameplay on two screens.

Inspired by a recent trend called the “One Chip Challenge,” Prithvi Parikh, Medina Forbes, Sophia Dominguez, and Gianna Calora set up a stand to demonstrate the Scoville scale, the scientific unit for measuring spiciness.

After months of preparation, this year’s Maker Faire came together on Wednesday, May 18 as a testament to the incredible array of STA students’ talent, creativity, and ingenuity. Student exhibits were held both indoors and outdoors and featured projects that ranged from catapults to blacksmithing to cardboard mechanical devices and more.

With the help of classmates and teachers, students’ displays at the STREAM Faire concluded months or years of efforts. In many cases, the best learning experiences were from failures, as noted by Brianna Mercado and Abigail O’Sullivan, members of the school’s First Tech Challenge Robotics Team. “The hardest part about our project was definitely the claw. For the FTC robot we’ve gone through about four prototypes of the claw; none of which have worked perfectly. The version we have currently is our best, but it’s still very faulty and that's something we'd love to improve on next season and in the future.”

You can learn about our STEM Learning Lab: “the place where you get to see what we make” on our website at stahs.net/academics.
STREAM Faire 2023