PORT TOWNSEND — The Port Townsend STEM Club table, set up outside the Food Co-op, is a kind of illustration that all things are connected.
First, there are flowers.
The club — whose initials stand for science, technology, engineering and math — is offering them at the co-op at 414 Kearney St. in a fundraiser for their wide-ranging activities.
Donations of $10 to $20 are suggested for the tulips, daffodils and crocuses, all in biodegradable pots.
STEM Club members will staff the table at the Co-op entrance from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. today, Saturday and Monday. The flowers, after all, could be Valentine’s Day gifts.
These locally grown blooms provide the STEM Club youngsters with revenue for their programs, which are spread across and beyond the Port Townsend School District.
Club member Nathaniel Ashford, 17, listed some of them: constructing miniature greenhouses for Salish Coast Elementary School classrooms; playing in the STEM Club’s band, the Lukewarm Chili Peppers; participating in conferences around the West; developing a program to recover derelict crab pots in the Salish Sea.
Robotics and automation are a major part of it all. For example, Ashford and his fellow engineers reuse old electronic parts to automate the mini greenhouses, so they ventilate themselves before the plants inside grow too warm.
“We also have an underwater robotics team,” Ashford added.
The students are working with local professionals to locate and recover lost crab pots, he said.
Older students such as Ashford have become STEM educators at Salish Coast Elementary and in the Port Townsend School District’s OCEAN (Opportunity, Community, Experience, Academics, Navigation) independent study program.
“Because of what we’ve been doing in the classrooms, we’re starting to see that work paying off,” Ashford said.
“As elementary students are going up to middle school and high school, we’re seeing them joining the club.”
Ashford, a high school senior, plans to take a gap year after graduation to travel — Australia calls to him — and then study mechanical engineering in college.
Gabriella Ashford, the lead mentor of the STEM Club — and Nathaniel’s mother — was galvanized to help start it about 10 years ago when she heard a speech by the American writer Marc Prensky.
He urged his listeners to work with “digital natives,” the young people born into the age of high technology, to meet the environmental emergencies the world is facing.
It was empowering, Gabriella said, to hear him talk about the younger generation’s potential.
Now the STEM Club has about 15 members, she said, “who are forces for change. Not only are they working on projects supported by the club, they are in the classrooms teaching the next generations.”
From third-graders on up, youngsters are working on all sorts of projects, she said.
In December, they built a gingerbread dragon for the Port Townsend Library’s gingerbread house competition. Constructing the creature involved science, engineering and storytelling.
The STEM Club runs on community support, which Gabriella said has been generous. The Master Gardener Foundation of Jefferson County and the Port Townsend Food Co-op are among the sponsors of the pre-Valentine’s Day flower fundraiser.
“They have been phenomenal,” Gabriella said.
Information about supporting the club can be found at www.ptstemclub.org.
The STEM students are change makers, she believes.
“These kids are getting to be an age,” Gabriella said, “where they’re learning to use the technological tools we have for good.”
________
Jefferson County Senior Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz @peninsuladailynews.com.
