evanston township high school steam class

“Learning, growth and struggle is all part of your grade, in a way that’s unlike other classes,” Perkins said. Students brainstorm during the STEAM Design Thinking and Innovation course at ETHS. Adding arts, taking a design approach and using student-devised strategies to help solve problems opens the door for more perspectives in the field, said partnership coordinator Kristen Perkins, who spearheaded the project. The class was modeled on a similar course offered at Northwestern and created with the help of the Northwestern/ETHS partnership office to widen the STEM pipeline. Demand for the interdisciplinary course is growing exponentially at ETHS, in part because it challenges students with creative problem-solving and gives them practical skills and experiences before leaving high school. Levi’s attitude was exactly what Northwestern University and ETHS designers had in mind when they developed the class, STEAM Design Thinking and Innovation. “Here, you can do what you want, and I’m doing it because I care.” “In most other classes, I’m doing the work to get the grade,” said Levi, who graduated in 2020 and is pursuing a degree in illustration at Columbia College in Chicago.

And if she skipped an assignment or didn’t pull her weight, she’d be letting down a client in the school or the community.

The questions Levi needed to solve lacked correct or even definitive answers.

And not just because the assignments seemed unrelated to algebra, AP Calculus or statistics. Jada Levi’s senior honors math class at Evanston Township High School was one of the most unusual courses she had ever taken.

Evanston township high school steam class