A San Antonio museum specializing in science, technology and math is inviting young people to learn from home.
Cliff Zintgraff says the San Antonio Museum of Science and Technology — SAMSAT — is all about STEM education for K through 12 grade, and then some.
"SAMSAT is a startup museum and STEM center that is located on the campus of Port San Antonio. We have lots of employers close by a lot of schools we work with," he said.
San Antonio entrepreneur and inventor David Monroe created SAMSAT.
"For decades he (Monroe) has been collecting museum quality artifacts, and there's computers, communications, cyber electronics," Zintgraff said.
But the collection doesn't just exist for curiosity's sake.
"He has taken that collection and put it into a museum preview center that we have now built a nonprofit around to use to advocate for stem education and careers, especially with K-12 students," he said.
COVID-19 has the museum and the in-person STEM activities on hold, but technology itself has made possible outreach activities, like online classes. Wednesday's class is called “Robotics!”
"We're going to work with all the students who are in our online class to develop a robotic bee whose job is to pollinate flowers and plants to address another challenge that we all know of in the world, which is declining bee population,” Zintgraff said. “But the main idea is to teach students about robots and how they work and how to program."
He said SAMSAT offers other classesas well for online learning during this isolated time.
Jack Morgan can be reached at Jack@TPR.org and on Twitter at @JackMorganii.