25th December, 2023
By Isa Isawade
The 2023 edition of the STEAM Expo organised by B bight kids education consultancy outfit has successfully taken some lucky children in Lagos through the practical journey of Science, arts and Technology.
STEAM, an acronym which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics is a concept created to introduce students to career opportunities through exposure to technologies in the fields of human endeavours.
B bight kids , whose main focus is to harness the talents inherent in individual children through early exposure to available technologies in those fields where they exhibit promising traits, organised twin STEAM Expo events in Surulere and Ijaiye in Lagos State, Southwest, Nigeria on Dec. 18 and 22 respectively.
According to the organisation’s Chief Executive Officer, Mrs Sherifah Busola Onisesi, who spoke with P.M.NEWS at the expo event held at Dream Park School, Surulere, the programme was organised for children between the ages of 5 and 25 to explore Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics to understand what they mean and the career paths that each of the departments has for them.
“STEAM Education is a way of incorporating Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics together. So, whatever talent the children have, STEAM covers it; they can express themselves the way they like.
“It’s just for them to be able to understand every science concept around them, how technologies are being made, how engineering concepts are being made, how they can infuse arts into science, technology and engineering.
“For instance, a fan is an engineering concept and for it to look beautiful, they add some other art concepts. Everything works hand in hand,” Mrs Onisesi explained.
She added that in March 2024, the outfit will organise a competition where students “will be competing in coding, robotics, digital literacy and steam. That is, they will be able to make some robots themselves and compete against themselves.”
P.M.NEWS interviewed a few of the scores of children who thronged the event and they excitedly spoke about their experiences.
Abdulbaqi Tijani, a ten-year-old Primary Six pupil who was met at the Robotics Department said, “Here, I have just learnt how to make LED bulbs, how to make a fan and make it rotate. I also learnt how to make a triangle with the electric conductor.”
How did he make the fan rotate? He explained: “On the fan, there are some LED bulbs. So, I joined some electric conductors together to create electricity to make the fan rotate. The electricity also powers the bulbs.”
His eight-year-old brother Nasir Tijani was working on a sensor powered by batteries to make it produce a green light result. He initially got a red light result against the green which his colleagues had gotten. He knew that something had gone wrong, he started the process all over and eventually got his desired result.
Adewole David is 12 years old. He’s a Junior Secondary School class 2 (JSS2) from Ogun State. He was applying coding rules to generate codes on computer systems in the ‘Steam Tech Terrain’ section where students freely fiddled with computers to create images, simulate and play video games.
How did he create the codes? He simply explained, “You need to follow some rules to create codes.”
Fifteen-year-old Evergreat Ogunronbi was working on the computer to create the Solar System when P.M.NEWS called. According to him, he was able to simulate that by putting “the Sun at the centre, making the Earth move around it and placing other planets around it.”
Mariam Bamiwa and her colleagues were at the Organic Cool Science section to perform scientific experiments to achieve some ends. They mixed some chemicals to obtain certain materials; they created the rainbow and other things.
12-year-old JSS2 student Zaka Abdullah was a member of Bamiwa’s team. He explained how they experimented with a balloon inside a bottle of water.
“We took a plastic; we made a hole inside it, then we put balloon, we blew the balloon and added water and we covered the hole we made in the plastic. Then, it became big; we tied the balloon and we left it there,” he narrated.
At the Artistic Avenue of the Expo event, several children were seen busy colouring to give colourful effects to different objects.
One of the ‘artists’ at the avenue was a 9-year-old Rakiat. He simply responded to P.M.NEWS enquiry by saying, “Here, we colour drawings to make them beautiful.”
