Focused on creating a space for creation, school officials presented the Board of Education with an update on the new STEM and robotics lab at Wilton High School on Thursday, May 15.
“Our purpose essentially was to develop this learning environment that was going to foster these STEM skills that are so important,” explained Fran Kompar, the former director of digital learning and instructional technologies for Wilton Public Schools, who continues to consult on the project.
A room has been chosen and will be converted in time for the next school year.
“We’re going to have a significant renovation over the summer,” WHS Assistant Principal Amy Korn said.
“As part of this, we went out and visited several area schools … and looked at their STEM and/or STEAM labs, just to get some ideas of what we might be looking for,” she said, “and used a lot of that information in our thinking about what that would look like,” including ideas for furniture, storage, and technology in order to create a state-of-the-art laboratory.
School officials received — and continue to receive — a significant amount of help from student Will Olmstead, a WHS junior and active robotics expert and advocate.
“When we first identified what we needed to buy and purchase for this room, we really thought back to the engineering design process, which is used by all engineers,” Olmstead said. “It goes from design, brainstorming, then you go to build, your testing, prototyping …”
“So we wanted to design the room around those different six, seven steps that you usually see in this cyclical design and engineering-thinking process,” he said.
The availability of white boards for writing and planning, as well as movable furniture, fosters the workflow, along with ample storage, Olmstead explained, and allows students to work collaboratively through various stages of the process.
“You’re thinking like an engineer, so you can produce students who, once they graduate, have that same type of thinking skill and are prepared for that type of environment,” he said.
The Wilton Educational Foundation is playing a pivotal role in the creation of the lab, giving a donation of $50,000.
“We couldn’t do this without community support,” Kompar said.
“We believe it was a generous contribution and it really has now helped us make this whole vision a reality … Were it not for the Wilton Education Foundation and their generosity, we wouldn’t have all of the aspects of this room that we do have now,” she said.
“This has been a multiple-year endeavor and started way before the 2023 school year,” Kompar said. “We underwent a curriculum review that went for a couple years, actually, because we realized there were so many different aspects to it.”
Along with help among the staff, she cited the work of students who are excited about the building of the lab.
“We have a lot of talent in this district … They have been invaluable in terms of the feedback and some of the work,” Kompar said of Olmstead and other students involved.
Olmstead, who captains the robotics team at Wilton Library and mentors several other teams in Wilton, said the high school will be adding a robotics team as well next year.
“We’re always looking for new activities and trying to expand the scope of robotics beyond the classroom, because there’s just an insane amount of interest,” he said, with dozens of kids signing up to be part of the few teams already in existence in town.
“The interest is there, so not just supplying it academically, but also supplying it outside the classroom, is really, really important,” Olmstead said.
BOE Chair Ruth DeLuca expressed the board’s appreciation for the work.
“I think it’s a fantastic space,” she said, noting it had once been the shop room years ago.
“It kind of just shows the evolution,” she said.
Olmstead spoke passionately not only about the fun of participating in robotics activities, but also the importance of outreach on behalf of it.
“Making an impact is really what matters in robotics right now, just so that it gets heard and it gets known and that interest is generated,” he said.
