Virtual Engagement
Maya Angelou Garden Party Video
Due to public health concerns regarding the COVID-19 virus, the Maya Angelou Garden Party did not take place in person in 2021. While we were disheartened by the inability to gather in-person yet again, we were able to add a visual element to the year’s celebration of Dr. Maya Angelou’s incredible legacy for a deeper virtual experience. We hope that this mini-documentary has become a true community-wide tribute to honor Dr. Angelou through spoken word, artwork, video clips, and poetry.
In order to add a conversational element to this event, we hosted a virtual post-party panel discussion with some of the speakers and performers from the mini-documentary.
The 2021 Maya Angelou Garden Party programming was transformed into a pre-recorded podcast by Yassmin Shaltout and can be accessed here:
2021 Maya Angelou Garden Party Podcast
Science Hour
Science Hour began in 2019 as an opportunity to welcome middle school participants at the Boys and Girls Club into Wake Downtown labs. Graduate Student Assistant, Israel Suarez was able to take “Science Hour” online. Take a look at the Youtube channel below to see Israel’s entertaining educational content!
The Science of Winston-Salem YouTube
During the summer of 2021, Yorjannys Gomez was able to transition Science Hour back to in-person lessons. These were held in Spanish and English for elementary school students at Latino Community Services. The summer sessions ended in a demonstration on music production, led by Bytesized Learning, a company owned by WFU engineering student, Andrew Rust, and his partner Ayden Hochstein.
STEAM Camp for Girls
A group of young women from Forsyth Country Day School with a passion for engineering, science, and the arts learned from a study that young girls ages 11-15 lose interest and confidence in pursuing STEM related fields despite scoring well in these subjects. They reached out seeking partnership from Wake Downtown to provide an engaging STEAM camp for girls. When safety protocols prevented the camp from taking place in-person at Wake Downtown, the team created a partially web-based and partially live camp for girls attending the Boys and Girls Club summer program. The goal of the camp was to encourage girls to learn more about science, technology, engineering and math in an atmosphere embedded in the arts.
Wake Academy
Wake Downtown strives to support student-led STEM engagement, especially in partnership with local schools. Wake Academy is an undergraduate student service organization that partners with Kimberley Park Elementary and Cook Elementary to provide fun and engaging extracurricular activities related to Science, The Arts, sports and more, for elementary-age students. We were pleased to lend our support to this organization in providing materials for Fall-themed STEM experiment kits for students at Cook Elementary. 250 elementary students will receive a kit that includes all the materials and instructions necessary to engage in at-home kitchen-based chemistry and to utilize the scientific method.
Biomedical Engineering Society
The Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) club is a joint BMES chapter for graduate students that was founded to help bridge the gap between the two Virginia Tech and Wake Forest University campuses. It offers participating students several ways to become involved in outreach projects within the local community and has partnered with Wake Downtown since 2019. Here are a few of their upcoming initiatives, supported by Wake Downtown:
December 2020. Scientific Communication Competition. Wake Forest University’s biomedical engineering students want to learn how to better communicate with the public about what they do and need help from future scientists to improve. Graduate students will submit a description of their research using only the most common 1000 words, and middle school students interested in STEM will judge these graduate students’ descriptions as well as choose winners in the categories “Best Overall”, “Most Interesting”, and “Most Understandable”. Middle school judges will have an opportunity to learn more about a broad spectrum of engineering research. With this event BMES hopes to increase young students’ interest in STEM fields.
January 2021. Learn to code workshops. Graduate students will provide weekly one-hour coding workshops utilizing the Alice programming software. Each lesson will include 15 minutes of introductory instruction and a 45-minute breakout session with hands-on demonstration with middle and high school students.
NC Science Festival
The Winston-Salem Science Bridge took place Saturday April 17, 2021. It was a free of charge, outdoor, knowledge-based fair with booths set up on both sides of the Long Branch Trail walking bridge located in downtown Winston-Salem’s Innovation Quarter. This strategic location symbolized a bridging of ideas, resources, and opportunities between Winston-Salem’s many science-related entities and the city’s community.
Friends-in-STEM Mentoring
Friends-in-STEM is a mentoring program designed to match local school children with a mentor, “friend-in-STEM.” Mentorship is proven to be a critical part of a young person in STEM’s personal and professional development. The representation, guidance, and reflection offered by mentorship seeks to encourage students to stay focused on their academic goals and to follow their passions. It also equips them with the excitement, skills, and resources which are necessary in looking for future programs, volunteering, and higher education opportunities. Our program’s goal is to help local students begin building these connections early while also sparking a light of curiosity in STEM. Participating students will be paired with a “friend-in-STEM” trained mentor who is a WFU undergraduate or graduate student studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
All mentors undergo the same training, which includes a background check, protection of minors training, and mentorship “best practices,” with assistance from the Wake Forest University Mentoring Resource Center. This program is also made possible with the support and close collaboration of the Office of Civic and Community Engagement.
Program coordinators (Alana James, Erin McCollum) will host periodic check-ins with each individual mentor to ensure that the pairs are holding regularly scheduled meetings. For the Spring 2025 version of the program, mentor-mentee pairs will have a virtual weekly hour-long 1:1 mentoring session guided by prompts. Mentoring will begin the week of Monday, February 3rd and run through the week of April 21st. There will be no mentoring the week of Spring Break, and mentoring will be optional during the week of April 21st, as this is WFU’s last week of classes before exams.
Register Your Student To Receive a Mentor Here!
Register to Become a Mentor Here!
The Science of Winston-Salem
In 2019, Wake Downtown teamed up with several local community-based arts, sciences, and educational organizations to support unlikely partnerships that uncover the science all around us. This group of partners, called “The Science of Winston-Salem”, hosted Science Cafes, film screenings and discussions, book signings, and the city’s first annual “Pint of Science”. While we were unable to host our slate of Spring events, partners will take events virtual.
The Pro Humanitate Corps
With the majority of courses having been offered online for the Fall 2020 semester, The Dean’s Office envisioned mobilizing students who wanted to remain active in the community, but were hindered by new health and safety precautions. A cross-departmental team including members from Wake Downtown, The Office of Civic and Community Engagement (OCCE) and The Dean’s Office designed an interdisciplinary local, service-based, credit bearing course. Twenty students, “Pro Humanitate scholars,” worked with nineteen community-partners (an off-campus nonprofit organization) to complete a semester-long project. These projects were proposed by the community partners and included tasks like developing educational and marketing materials for programs, collecting and compiling data, critically reviewing & rebuilding websites, increasing social media presence, and developing various service programs and trainings. There are projects from both local and national organizations addressing a variety of issues including voter registration, educational equity, environmental sustainability, capacity-building, and access to resources.
Students applied to participate and were matched with partner organizations based on the skills and interests displayed in their applications. Outside of their individual projects, students attended lectures and discussions with their cohort on various civic-learning topics to better connect their projects with academic concepts as well as their personal and professional development.
One pair of Pro Humanitate Scholars, Anusha Samant (’22) and Sebastian Pauli-Rivas (’23), worked with Highland Avenue Primary Care Clinic to record and edit a video for their Health Fair. Watch the video here:
Wake Forest LEAP
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has awarded funding to support
a new Wake Downtown initiative called WF LEAP. The Wake Forest LEAP (Lab Experiences: Academics and Professions) program will serve as a long-term, paid, lab-based summer internship program for high school students. It will be located at Wake Forest University and will target underrepresented minority students who otherwise would not be able to have a meaningful STEM-based internship.