The Future Generation of Innovators

Among the many clubs and activities provided at NHS, the Nutley Youth STEM club was recently created by three juniors interested in STEM. Garv Goswami, Adam Benali, and Karam Youssef created this club in order to not only get high school students involved with STEM, but begin to get interested elementary students learning about STEM.

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; an interdisciplinary area of study that allows students to learn and develop key skills in the field. Creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, experimenting with new ideas, include the many skills that are gained from STEM programs and used across many different careers.  “The Nutley Youth STEM Club is a club dedicated to teaching STEM principles to elementary students to further their knowledge in the subject”, explains Karam Youssef, co-founder of the club.  “We take dedicated students of the high school and assign them tasks to provide education and enrichment to the future generation of our community.” 

Goswami, Benali, and Youssef recognize the importance of bringing STEM programs to NHS, along with wanting to get the next generation of innovators excited about STEM. They achieved this by creating a community where highschool students can express their knowledge and interest in the field by teaching younger students.  “We created this club to give students more opportunities for STEM and make our high school offer more STEM-related programs”, says Adam Benali, co-founder of the club. “We think that it will bring more STEM-related classes and extracurricular activities to NHS, but our main focus is inspiring the next generation of students to become motivated and interested in STEM related fields.” Elementary students can look up to the high school students as role models while learning and, hopefully soon in the future, work together on STEM activities and experiments.  

“When we first had the idea to create this club, the pandemic was the biggest question on our minds,” explains Garv Goswami, co-founder of the club. “Originally, we had planned to visit the elementary schools in-person to perform experiments with the children hands-on. We can’t do that with the world’s current situation, so we decided to do the next best thing: teach the kids virtually.”

Regarding the pandemic, the club  has figured out a way to connect with the younger students, making sure they are able to learn and experiment with STEM programs from their homes.  “We began making videos performing basic experiments that kids can follow along with at home and explaining the science behind them,” says Goswami. “After that, we opened our club up to new members, and we now have over 20 dedicated members giving back to their communities! For now, we will continue to roll out videos on various STEM Subjects, including basic computer skills instruction and coding lessons.”  

While this is only the beginning, Goswami, Benali, and Youssef already have exciting plans for the future of the club where it can take place in-person. “ In the future, we plan to host in-person engineering competitions, science experiments, programming walkthroughs, and other STEM activities,” says Goswami. 

The Nutley Youth STEM Club is an opportunity for high school students to step up as role models for the youth that is curious about STEM. By “Inspiring the Future”, the Nutley Youth STEM club hopes to bring excitement to the field and motivate students towards their future possibilities.