Alaska Native students pursue STEM, with great success

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sam Larson was looking for loopholes.

Crouched on the floor of a sunny student building at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, Sam was surrounded by cardboard, scissors, rulers and about a dozen other high school students. All of them were attending a residential summer “Acceleration Academy” hosted at the university by the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, or ANSEP. On this July day, with pop music playing in the background, Sam and his classmates were trying to build cardboard canoes capable of transporting at least one paddling student to a target and back.

Sam, 15, brandished the list of rules for the Cardboard Canoe STEM Lab. (STEM is short for science, technology, engineering and math.) He had read them carefully. Jotted at the bottom were his notes about possible loopholes that had already been scuttled: “No swimming boats. No surfboard styles. Yes to rafts.”

Back in his hometown of Homer, a cruise-stop town on the southern coast of Alaska, Sam’s father runs an internet provider service and his grandfather owns a mechanic’s shop. But moments like this one, where he has the opportunity to use math and science to solve a complex problem with his own unique solution, have led Sam to want a different life, a life most of his ancestors couldn’t have pursued. He plans to be an engineer.

Like 80 percent of the students enrolled in ANSEP, Sam is Alaska Native. Children with his ethnic background are much more likely than their white peers to grow up in poverty, fail standardized assessments of math proficiency and skip college. The ANSEP kids are proof that such statistics are only true until they are not…

Read the full story on The Hechinger Report.

Photo Credit: Lillian Mongeau Hughes/The Hechinger Report