Navy Elementary’s STEAM Fair:
Improving Your Life with STEAM
Monday, March 27, 2023
Navy’s annual STEAM Fair is back! This all-day, school-wide event features presentations from professionals in STEAM-related fields and a Fair highlighting student-led projects. Participation in the Fair is free and open to all Navy students in grades K-6. To register your child, please complete the form at the bottom of this page.
STEAM Fair Theme
The theme for this year’s Fair is “Improving Your Life with STEAM.” Challenges exist all around us during school, activities, free time, and home, and STEAM provides unique ways to improve our lives and the lives of people around us. We want to see how Navy students can improve their lives and the lives of people in their community through explorations in the STEAM fields: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math.
To get started, students might consider one of the following topics for their project:
- What ways can STEAM be used to help you accelerate at school? By what method and how will you measure success?
- How can technologies be used to help you achieve some of your out-of-school activities from clubs to sports?
- What are some challenges that you see in your local community? What improvements can be achieved through STEAM?
- Do your family or friends have challenges that could be helped with STEAM capabilities?
- How do we communicate today and how can it be improved? How can we better communicate with family, work, or social media?
- Many STEAM inventions help keep nature beautiful. What methods can you create to help make nature more beautiful?
- How can new technologies improve your every day life?
The website Jason Learning is a good science resource and is available to students through their Google login.
Student Led Projects
STEAM Fair projects are about asking questions like “Why?,” “How?,” or “What if?.” Projects can fall into one or more STEAM-related fields. Students can:
- Use scientific, engineering, or design methodologies to discover answers to their questions,
- Create a model or presentation to show how something works, or
- Explore and present theme-related topics through the arts (visual, music, etc.).
Whatever the project, the ideas and work should come from the student. It is important that students conduct their own research, experiments, and discovery—even if the experiment or design doesn’t work!
Parents should use their best judgment in deciding when to get involved, such as when there is a potential safety issue. For especially young students, parents may provide some guidance.
Project Teams
Students may work on projects independently, with a partner, or with a team. Partners or team members can come from different classes or grades, but all participants must be current Navy Elementary students. Maximum team size is four.
Information Guides
Before starting on a project, students and parents should review the following information guides to understand the rules, guidelines, and procedures for the STEAM Fair:
- 2023 STEAM Fair Information Packet
- Science Project Guide
- Engineering Design Project Guide
- Integrating Arts into STEAM
Judging
Our goal in hosting the Fair is to encourage exploration and discovery and to promote a deep, lifelong passion for STEAM. The STEAM Fair is not a competition between students. Instead, projects are evaluated on their individual merits and within grade-level expectations.
On the day of the Fair, students will present their projects to our judges who will evaluate them using the Judging Rubric linked below. Projects that show extra effort may receive gold, silver, or bronze ribbons for their team members.
Judging Rubric: 2023 Navy STEAM Fair Judging Rubric
Volunteers Needed
A big event like the STEAM Fair is only possible with help from volunteers. Specifically, we need speakers in a STEAM career field to talk to the students the day of the event, and we need people to help with set up, execution, and clean up. Please contact Daniel Courain for more information on how you can help make the STEAM Fair a success.