The
National Inventor's Hall of Fame School . . . Center for STEM Learning (NIHF School) is getting a lot of attention these days. Not just from local media, but from nationally renowned news operations such as Newsweek and CNN.
Alison White, grant communications coordinator for the
Ohio STEM Learning Network's Akron Hub, says that attention is a welcome acknowledgement that the school must be doing something right.
"We're thrilled that the school is getting national media coverage," she says. "The common theme in the national media is that they're very interested in how we teach creativity to students."
In July, Newsweek featured the NIHF School in an article titled "
The Creativity Crisis." The Akron middle school was included as an example of how the STEM learning environment promotes collaboration and problem-solving. Newsweek focused on how students there investigated and recommended solutions to noise that was filtering from the school's walk-in area to the learning commons (library).
On Thursday (Nov. 18) CNN will
premier a piece about the school on "Anderson Cooper 360." The program will air again on Friday, Saturday and Sunday on both CNN and HLN, White says. Two seventh graders -- Nyna Sayarath and Dylan Stiles -- were interviewed as part of that story, she says.
"The way that we view it here is that we are a STEM school, but STEM is the vessel that we use to help our students become creative and inventive thinkers," White says. "We feel we're doing it right, but to get that positive feedback from objective media sources is fabulous."
Source: Alison White, NIHF School
Writer: Gene Monteith