Sparta — In the back corner of Sparta Middle School’s STEM makerspace, seventh-graders Kingston Reynolds and Corbin McIntyre sat perched on the edges of their seats, watching wide-eyed as a robotic arm moved into place and slowly closed a three-pronged claw grip around a colorful stack of four square blocks.
“If we do this —” Kingston said, letting the rest of his sentence go unsaid, hanging in the air as the robot arm lifted the stack, swung to the right about 8 inches, and gently rested the blocks back down on the table without a single one out of place.
“We did it,” Corbin said, elated. “We did it, we did it, we did it!”
What they did was become the first pair in the seventh-grade MEERA lab class to program a robot to move such a tall stack without the thing coming apart. But elsewhere in the room, others were already trying to one-up them, going for five blocks.
‘I’m learning just as much as the kids, if not more. … It’s been great to work alongside them.’
— STEM teacher Ericka McKellar
MEERA, which stands for Manufacturing and Engineering Education Reimagined for All, is a national initiative that brings hands-on manufacturing and engineering curriculum into middle schools. The MEERA lab is new to Sparta, launching at the start of the school year thanks to a grant from the Michigan Department of Education.
Ericka McKellar, the middle school’s STEM teacher, oversees the MEERA lab class, which is an elective available to seventh- and eighth-graders. Students visit the lab three times a week to work with machines and learn about careers in the manufacturing industry.
The lab is a great addition to the middle school, McKellar said, adding that many students don’t learn much about engineering and manufacturing unless they attend Kent Career Tech Center in high school. The MEERA lab gives them an early “mini glimpse” at the options that will open up to them in the future.
And students love what they’ve seen so far, she said.
‘It’s really cool to see what these things can do’
While Kingston and Corbin were setting their record, their classmates Melanie Jaimes-Sostenes and Molly Lundquist were trying to teach their robot arm how to use suction to lift and move a stack of multicolored hearts.
With one hand, Melanie guided the arm up, down and over, showing the device how to perform the desired movement. Each movement was recorded and programmed into a laptop, and the Dobot brand robot arm “remembered” the motions.
“Whatever movement we do, it programs it,” Melanie said, “so it’ll do it in order.”
“We’re kind of just, like, messing all around with it and seeing what we can do,” Molly added.
Working with the robotic arms is just the most recent activity students have taken on in the MEERA lab. They’ve also used computer numerical control machines, 3D printers and lasers, and they’ve learned how to weld using virtual-reality headsets.
The unit with the robot arm is Melanie’s favorite so far.
“It’s just very interesting and I’ve never really seen anything like this, where it just remembers your program,” she said. “It’s really cool to see what these things can do.”
Student Ethan Vargas was equally enthusiastic about the unit and the lab as a whole.
“This has made me want to become an engineer, working with machines like this,” he said.
‘I’m learning as much as the kids’
McKellar said the MEERA lab has been a popular elective among students so far. She has around 45 students in the class now, with even more signed up for next semester.
“There are a lot of kids who see what we’re doing in here, they walk by, they see it in the windows, and they’re like, ‘I wanna do that,’” she said.
She said she hopes to expand the program in the future and make it available to more grade levels at the middle school.
McKellar said it was a bit overwhelming at first to deal with the new curriculum, machines, tools and supplies that came with the program, but now she’s settling into a rhythm and learning as she goes.
“I’m learning just as much as the kids, if not more,” she said. “It’s been great to work alongside them.”
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