Maurice Cable
Maurice Cable held the glider in his hands. Hardly more than a foot in length, it had a measuring-stick fuselage, a red clay nose and Styrofoam wings cut to look like an eagle’s. “I know that eagles are really good at flying,” Cable explained. “They can glide, like, 20 minutes without flapping their wings.” He was similarly direct about the inspiration for the plane’s decal motif, of basketballs wearing crowns. “Basketballs are popular,” he said, “and kings used to get respect from people.”
Cable, a risingfifth grader, is one of nearly 300 Harrisburg-area students who participated last month in Summer Engineering Experience for Kids, a free, three-week summer camp held at Marshall Math Science Academy. The program, run by the National Society for Black Engineers, aims to attract minority students to the so-called STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and math—with a hands-on curriculum taught by mentors.
“Minorities are obviously severely underrepresented in STEM fields,” said Franklin Moore, the program’s national director. “We had to create a STEM pipeline.” Moore founded the program in 2007, with the first camp taking place in Washington, D.C. It has since expanded to 16 cities, including San Diego, Detroit, Chicago and, for the first time this year, Harrisburg.
On a Friday in June, at the end of the camp’s first week, a dozen or so students sat around a podium in a hallway at Marshall, intermittently smiling for the cameras. “The statistics prove that STEM fields are growing,” said Cheryl Capozzoli, who was hired last year as the school district’s STEM coordinator. “By 2018, there’s going to be an influx of STEM professions that we need to fill here in the United States.” She gave a quick sketch of the camp curriculum, which was built around three engineering projects—gliders, fuel-cell cars and “gravity cruisers,” simple vehicles powered by a weighted lever and fulcrum. At the end of each week, students would test their designs in competitions. “We could probably ask them,” Capozzoli said. “Are you having fun this week?”
“Yeeeesss,” the students said in unison.
Each camp is staffed with between 40 and 50 mentors, whose stipends are paid, along with other program expenses, by a mix of national and local benefactors. Moore said that Gene Veno, who headed the state intervention in district finances until his resignation in the spring, was “instrumental” in raising money from sponsors, among them Siemens, PNC Bank, McClure Co. and PNG Energy.
“I love seeing the kids strive for excellence and seeing how excited they get about learning,” Joshuah Davis, a four-time mentor and the site director this year for the Harrisburg program, told me. Like most mentors, Davis has a science background—he holds a mathematics degree from Fort Valley State University and is completing a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Arkansas. “My first year as a mentor, I had a lot of kids start crying the last day of camp because they didn’t want to leave,” he said. “We didn’t realize, you know, we really touched the kids like that.”
“It’s important for these young people to see that there are other African-American men and women out there who came from the same kinds of backgrounds that they come from and yet have taken that extra step to engage themselves in this rigorous study of engineering and sciences,” said Joseph Robinson, Jr., president of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Development Institute, a local nonprofit that helped bring the program to Harrisburg. “I don’t know whether we’ve got a George Washington Carver sitting here on the floor,” he said, “but I know we’ve got some future scientists and engineers sitting right here at this press conference.” On the floor, students straightened their backs and refreshed their smiles.
Later that afternoon, the cafeteria reverberated with the din of some hundred or so students in team colors—red, yellow, blue and green. They took turns firing their gliders from a rubber-band launcher into a landing strip marked off with tape on the tile floor. A series of contests tested the gliders for distance, height, hang time and accuracy. As the green team fitted its aircraft into the launcher, a prayer wafted up from the red team’s benches: “Please don’t make it go so far.” The first shot was a dud: the rubber band snagged, the glider tumbled down, and the young man operating the launcher looked profoundly disappointed. But on the second shot, his teammate sent the glider nearly to the opposite wall. The room erupted.
“We try to teach them with having fun,” said Sierra Butcher, a first-time mentor from Wilmington, Del. She beckoned to Cable, who came over to explain how he resolved his glider’s early design flaw—too much clay. She engaged him in a brief, Socratic exchange:
“What force is the clay?”
“Weight,” Cable said.
“OK. And what is another name for weight?”
“Mass.”
“So, what happened when you took the clay off?”
“It got lighter and it flew farther.”
Butcher said that students had learned the NSBE mission statement, which Cable rattled off on demand: “To increase the number of culturally responsible black engineers who excel academically, and succeed professionally, and positively impact the community.” Asked whether he wanted to become a scientist, though, his answer was more informal. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “I’m still working on it.”
