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A STEAM-Fueled Dream Takes Flight

Lucy Gellman | January 14th, 2025

A STEAM-Fueled Dream Takes Flight

Culture & Community  |  Education & Youth  |  Arts & Culture  |  Yale Peabody Museum

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Top: FBLA and faculty advisor Lakesha Kirkland with students at the end of the launch, as they received certificates of recognition for their participation. Bottom: Adira Ahmad-Rizal during her presentation. Lucy Gellman Photos.

The room sat at rapt attention. On twin screens, a seafoam-colored mosasaurs swam toward a sea snail, a trail of bubbles to its right. Around it, the ocean seemed vast and dark, a blue-green that was suddenly all encompassing. The screen changed to an old, battered husk of a shell that looked as though it had once bobbed happily along in the ocean.

What, asked Adira Ahmad-Rizal, could a 400 million year old fossil tell people about life today?

Saturday, that question came vibrantly to life at the Yale Peabody Museum thanks to STEAMTEEN, a new, student-led initiative to bring STEAM education—that’s science, technology, engineering, arts and math—to more young people in New Haven.

The brainchild of students at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) and Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School (Co-Op), it offers STEAM-focused events and workshops that are open and free to the public. The hope is to make STEAM education more accessible to all young New Haveners, not just those who attend a specialized magnet school. It is open to students from sixth through twelfth grade.

“It means a lot to me that this is going to happen,” said Co-Founder and Co-President Mari Arnold, a senior at ESUMS who has been dreaming about the group since her freshman year at the school. Growing up as both a dancer and a kid interested in STEM, “I just noticed that I didn’t have opportunities to do this where I’m from. We wanted to make this into a real thing.”

The idea has been years in the making. After starting at ESUMS her freshman year, Arnold and fellow student Emma Adams submitted a sketch of STEAMTEEN to the Technology Student Association (TSA), a national organization focused on science and STEM learning for middle and high schoolers across the country. At the time, the two dreamed up the program as a place to let fellow young people flex their STEAM skills, whether or not they were getting them in their classrooms.

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Members of the leadership team. 

For her, it was also personal: Arnold danced for 12 years before high school, thanks in part to an education at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS). She also wants to pursue neuroscience and medicine, and has loved science since she was little. She believed in arts learning—but not at the expense of her STEM goals. Then during her time at ESUMS, she joined Evolutions, a free Peabody Museum program for high school students. 

When she and Adams first dreamed up STEAMTEEN—which won a prize with the TSA—she reached out to the Peabody to see if she could make it a reality. But the timing wasn’t right: the museum was already closed to the public for renovation, and New Haven was still in the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Arnold put the idea on the back burner, and doubled down on her academic work. She grew her footprint at the Peabody to include Sci.CORPS, which gives high school students a chance to work as paid, trained science educators in the museum. 

But the group was often on her mind, especially when she heard about peers who didn’t have a path to STEAM education in their school. Like many of her peers, she saw it as an educational equity issue: access to STEAM learning shouldn’t be a rarefied thing, contingent on winning a magnet lottery. 

Then last year, she and peers brought the idea to Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), an arm of which operates at ESUMS. The timing was right: Arnold had worked with ESUMS junior Nivreth Ananth Iyer (he is now the group’s other founder and president) to build a website, and they had a blueprint for the program. The Peabody was also open again, meaning that they had a potential partner if they wanted to make it a reality.

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Students received certificates of recognition for their participation at the end of an hours-long program. 

“I’d heard from so many people interested in STEAM who didn’t have the chance to pursue it,” Ananth Iyer said. This time, the idea stuck.    

“It’s her brain baby—” said ESUMS junior Isaiah Correa Saturday, gesturing to Arnold with a laugh—but it became a sort of ambitious group project. Most of the team members are also affiliated with FBLA.

Last year, a small group of students mobilized, raising the funds for matching STEAMTEEN t-shirts, early programming and in-kind donations. They looped in students like Laila Kelley-Walker, a senior at Co-Op who sings in the choir but also wants to pursue nursing, and Ahmed Solomon, a junior at ESUMS who does coding and web development, but also loves videography and photography. They built a team, from media officers and event coordinators to apprentice-like interns.

They also found a faculty advisor in Lakesha Kirkland, who teaches digital media arts and technology at ESUMS and supervises the school’s FBLA chapter. Arnold, meanwhile, worked with Andrea Motto, assistant director of public education and outreach at the Peabody. She credited Motto with helping to make both STEAMTEEN and her own love for science education possible.

Saturday, that vision came to life across the Peabody’s lower floor, where tables with blue-and-gold ESUMS sweatshirts, a bright welcome sign and STEAMTEEN lit peeked out as soon as the elevator and stair doors slid open. Inside a bright conference room, balloons and crepe paper made the space feel as if it were ready for a birthday party, cuing the celebration before activities even began.

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As students—mostly peers from ESUMS—braved the morning’s light snow, they filled the space, chatter falling to a hum as organizers introduced a day of science trivia, wood-craft engineering, and guest speakers like Hector Aguilan, a senior laboratory technician at the College of Staten Island who is working on the study of venomics and its use in the medical field.

“Our goal is to make this inclusive,” Ananth Iyer said. In addition to STEAM-based activities, students make sure there's representation of women in science, and more diversity across the field. While schools and institutions of higher education are now addressing STEM’s gender gap, it often remains more of a chasm. 

That need for representation felt present in the last hours of the afternoon, as Ahmad-Rizal made her way to the front of the room. A New Havener herself and graduate of Hill Regional Career High School, Ahmad-Rizal is now a junior at Yale and a collections assistant in invertebrate paleontology at the Peabody. In high school, she was also involved in Evolutions, like many of the students now in STEAMTEEN.

Her personal field of research is predator-prey relationships, a phrase that seemed to pique attention across the room as students put away their phones and put their conversations on pause. As she slipped into her presentation, she looked around, pausing for questions that she had built in.

“What is a fossil?” she asked the room early on. On the screen behind her, a neat array of fossils sat photographed beneath glass, with a short explanation of peleoecology.

“Maybe a kind of organism?” ventured a student toward the front of the classroom, still dressed in a puffy winter coat. “Or not even an organism. Like, a thing preserved in nature?”

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“What do you think fossils are telling us?” Ahmad-Rizal continued.

“It’s the lifestyle of an animal or plant,” suggested Kayson Maciel-Andrews, so focused on the presentation that he had nearly moved to the edge of his seat.

She nodded as she pulled up an image of two different shells, each broken by a predator. One was 400 million years old and in the Peabody’s collection, she explained, pointing out a repair scar where the animal had attempted to heal itself after an attack. The other came from a nearby Asian supermarket, and had become a crab’s plaything in the name of science. 

What she was interested in, she continued, was figuring out what predator could have done the damage—and what humans can learn from them now, hundreds of millions of years later.

Students were razor-focused on the presentation now. “Is it possible that that the snail encountered three different predators?” one asked. What about the squid and octopi that once occupied the oceans, much larger than they are now, Maciel-Andrews chimed in. Ahmad-Rizal weighed the questions and moved on, and the afternoon rolled forward. 

That’s the whole point, Arnold later said: to expose students to STEAM learning, research, and real-world applications that they may not otherwise encounter in their academic or personal lives. She and fellow team members are already working towards the next event, planned tentatively for the spring.

As they poured back into the hallway for a group photo, students seemed excited to be part of the initiative. Maciel-Andrews, for instance, said he was happy to participate—and had ended up with lessons from both Ahmad-Rizal and Aguilan that he planned to take back to school with him on Monday.

A junior at ESUMS, he’s been interested in science for as long as he can remember. He also loves the Peabody, where he’s been coming for years. So when his mom got an email about STEAMTEEN from the school, it was an easy yes.

“It’s always good to get more exposure,” he said, adding that his favorite part was Ahmad-Rizal’s presentation. “I probably would have reacted differently if it weren’t at the Peabody. It’s just a place I have good memories.” 

Learn more about STEAMTEEN here. Donate to their fundraising efforts here