You may have heard of STEM education.

Who hasn't?

That's an acronym used for science, technology, engineering and math studies by Have you heard of STEM?

Kentucky Edition's Kelsey Starks explains who puts the why in STEM.

Well, the why in STEM stands for youth.

That's because it's an entirely student run nonprofit organization designed to make STEM studies more inclusive for all they have is for nothin.

Is the chief operating officer for STEM and also a junior at Louisville's DuPont Manual High School.

Thank you for being here very much.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us, first of all, how this all came about.

So in 2017, a group of DuPont manual students started a science fair club at our school.

And essentially the point was to have upperclassmen help the underclassmen who are struggling with science fair, get them a little bit more involved, help them out.

And then the founders of that club realized that there are students outside of manual and outside of just our little area that needed help with things like science fair and needed help with, you know, just getting resources to stem.

So they kind of branched out and they turned it into a nonprofit.

This is amazing.

And again, entirely student run.

There are no teacher sponsors.

There are no teacher leaders.

It's all from students.

Why is this?

What's the importance that you see or what's the difference you see in the kids that you help?

Well, for us, you know, a lot of the members in STEM know how much it matters to have quality STEM education.

And we know that there are schools in Kentucky, in the Louisville metro area who just don't have access to those resources.

And we know that that changes a lot of things because students there's a stigma around STEM.

You know, students think that it's boring or it's too hard to be a part of.

And our mission is to get that stigma to kind of be broken.

And we want students to be more passionate about it and to be more confident in their abilities.

And we feel like doing three workshops and initiations that we have, we can get them a little bit more excited about it.

Yeah, and students learn best from their peers, people a little closer in age to them.

So you have workshops going on in Louisville right now.

Tell us about some of those.

So right now we have a massive maniac's workshop, which is our math program, and they do just math stuff outside of the curriculum and they do really cool things with fractals and stuff like that.

And they have a workshop currently going on at the Highland Shelby Park Library.

And then we also have a STEM mechanic's workshop coming up, which is our engineering program, and they do Rube Goldberg's and paper airplanes and stuff like that, teach kids a little bit about physics, and that's happening at Georgetown Elementary.

And so this is primarily elementary, middle school kids.

We have a high school initiate like initiative, and that's a student research journal.

Okay.

And so how can students get involved?

It's through their own school, right?

Yeah.

So for elementary and middle schoolers, he wants them to come to their schools.

We always just encourage them to talk to their teachers and reach out to us.

We have our websites, dummy dot org, and they can contact us and we can do our best to work something out.

In terms of high schoolers, we have our fellowship program, which is where high schoolers can apply to be a part of STEM and kind of learn the ins and outs of it and figure out what program suits them best that they want to work with.

And this is high schoolers who want to teach younger kids and want to give back.

I love that.

But it's not just for students to there are community members or businesses can also get involved and how can they help?

For businesses and adults, we always just encourage them to donate because we need materials and we need, you know, money to be able to buy some of this stuff that we do.

Like, for example, for our STEM mechanics workshop, they need just like little materials, like cardboard, and they need snacks for their kids to get them, you know, keep them engaged.

So we always just ask for donations, doing some step.

September, we have this really big month long initiative called September.

And, you know, we try and raise as much money as we possibly can.

This will last year we raised 2000 and $100.

Wow.

Towards materials.

So, yeah, that's wonderful.

A wonderful thing.

Kids giving back to kids.

I love it all around.

And if you are one of those high schoolers with an interest in STEM education, helping other students, that fellows application period is open right now.

And it's open until April 15th.

Thank you, Kelsey.

Since its creation five years ago, the STEM organization estimates it's impacted more than 1600 students and counting.