As a sunset of orange and pink hues set on the Oquirrh Mountains one January evening, more than 100 students and their families missed it as they moved from classroom to classroom exploring and buzzing with excitement during Midvalley Elementary’s STEAM Night. 

It was an evening designed to spark imagination and curiosity as well as fun as students launched fan-powered creations to lighting up alien circuits, discovering learning doesn’t stop when the school bell rings, said Ashleigh Luna, Midvalley’s STEM teacher.

“I’m hoping to get the kids engaged and invested in the STEM field,” Luna said. “I want them to grow and blossom in science, technology, engineering and math. It’s an important focus in childhood. It opens and brightens their minds. It opens up career opportunities. It opens their ability to learn and look at the world with curiosity and be excited about the natural world.”

Midvalley students regularly rotate through 45-minute STEM activities during the school week, and there is an after-school STEM club, but STEAM Night allows families to see that learning firsthand.

“I like seeing the students with their parents,” Luna said. “I don’t usually see parents engaging with them, but this is exciting and they’re having fun.”

Parents like David Baldwin say STEAM Night has become a family tradition.

“We come every STEAM Night,” he said. “It’s fun making these projects with the kids. They have different ones every time.”

Students learned through hands-on activities exploring human anatomy while engineering a robot hand or building circuits with light-up aliens. Some learned about Utah water use with information from USGS and NASA and others explored booths from community partners, Clark Planetarium and Utah Valley University. 

Second-grader Riley Turiano said his favorite thing was to “light up the bug” and learn the science behind it. 

First-grader Tory Gertsch, who coded a robotic mouse independently, said, “I like all the ways it can go.” 

His mother, Ally, appreciated it as a time when he could try new activities.

“He can experiment and test things out and figure out how they work,” she said.

While fourth-grader Will Taggart liked exploring more STEM activities in addition to coding during his weekly STEM club, his mother, Sarah Morton, paused from helping her second-grade son, Theo Taggart.

“I love how they can look at the regular objects and activities creatively,” she said. “Last year, we spent an hour in a room with various supplies where they could imagine and build. They had to kick us out when it was time to turn off the lights.”

Many of the stations were directed by adults although several others volunteered, like Hillcrest High sophomore Aisha Puri, who organized about 20 members of Hillcrest’s Key Club to help.

“We reach out to this school a lot to help with events for the elementary kids like this and literacy night,” Puri said, adding she’s part of Hillcrest’s robotics team. “It’s fun helping our community and especially here because the little kids are so cute and curious. They’re excited to be learning.”