By the time Laksh “Lucky” Dhir was old enough to drive, he was already piloting his own educational nonprofit known as STEMscapes. He was planning and leading hands-on experiments for Dublin City Schools in elementary and middle school classrooms to ignite a passion for STEM in every child.
While he ran into a few bumps along the way, Dhir learned some valuable lessons that helped him make a truly better experience not only getting students excited about learning, but also finding ways to inspire kids to see all the possibilities STEM can offer.
Escaping the norm
When Dhir first began his program, he realized that reaching his goal of educating students about STEM was less straightforward than he initially expected. After a few visits to classrooms, Dhir recognized two problems with his traditionally conducted experiments.
One realization came during a ‘lava lamp’ experiment when students began shaking their homemade plastic bottle lava lamps, trying to mix the oil and water ingredients together.
“Do oil and water mix?” He asked the students.
“No!” they answered in unison.
“Then why are you shaking your bottles?” He replied.
Dhir realized that even though the students knew that oil and water didn’t mix, they weren’t conceptualizing and applying it to a real-world situation. He also noticed that students seemed to focus more on completing the steps on a paper handout, rather than thinking critically and learning through the experience.
He contacted Charles Hill at COSI for advice. Hill informed him that hands-on experiments are great for generating excitement around learning STEM topics. But, while the students may feel inspired during the experiment, it likely won’t be enough to continue that interest after the activity is completed.
Dhir thought back to an escape room he had tried a couple of weekends prior. There were no instruction manuals on how to solve the puzzles to successfully exit the room, but he remembered every challenge he had to complete and how he did it.
He thought to himself, ‘What if I created an activity with a similar structure that could help keep students inspired even after the experiment is completed while effectively teaching STEM?’
Thus, STEMscapes was born.
“(In an escape room) you don’t know anything that’s happening, and you’re not given an instruction manual that you can follow. You’re just working through it, and that’s basically how we try to do STEMscapes,” Dhir says. “We just give kids a bunch of STEM puzzles without any instructions and provide more materials than they need. You’d be surprised, even 5-year-olds are able to create things like oxygen at such a young age and learn all these things with this technique.”
This method proved successful as Dhir sees students initially uninterested in STEM become captivated by the escape room simulation. Some even ask Dhir for advice on how they can get involved with STEM concepts.
“They’re no longer thinking about doing STEM, they’re trying to solve a game or a puzzle. So, while they’re learning, it goes out of their mind that they’re in a school environment learning. So that’s a really unique thing about it,” Dhir says.
Leveling up
Now a pre-med student at The Ohio State University, Dhir didn’t initially intend on continuing his nonprofit. However, ignoring his passion left him feeling unfulfilled and he quickly jumped back in.
STEMscapes was recently chosen for a $50,000 grant through Ohio State’s first Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship President’s Buckeye Accelerator competition.
Through the brand-new Keenan Center, Dhir and his team have the opportunity to receive guidance and career advancement mentorship.
“I know previous graduating classes definitely didn’t have all the opportunities that we had,” he says. “I’m very grateful for what we have right now. I think the changes made by the university were definitely for the better to offer these opportunities.”
What started as a high school project between Dhir and a couple of friends has now grown to a team of 18 people, many of whom are fellow Dublin City School alums, with plans to add 10 more.
These team members offer their time and expertise to create curriculums and share ideas for new STEMscapes programming. Together they have created STEMscapes experiments with themes including missions on Mars, Antarctic adventures and even rocket fuel engineering.
Real-world scientists
As of now, each STEMscape is created to fit an educator’s specific needs rather than offering a standard escape room procedure which is how Dhir prefers to keep it.
“I feel like if we target standardization with standardization, then you’re not solving the problem,” he says. “We need the personalization, and we need more people to work on it and more personalized elements, at least in the STEMscape rooms we’re providing, rather than making sure everything is standard and scalable in the same way.”
Nothing could replace dedicated teachers and traditional learning materials, Dhir says. This is why STEMscapes provides educators with modules they can present to students to further review the concepts.
However, textbooks and worksheets alone are often less effective than hands-on learning when it comes to real-world applications.
“I took organic chemistry and a professor taught us this whole curriculum and at the end of it, he’s like, ‘Just to let you know, only about 20 percent of what I taught actually happens in real life, the 80 percent is just in ideal conditions,’” Dhir says.
Another advantage of hands-on learning is preparing students for possible STEM careers down the road.
“What if they’re working in the field, or if they want to pursue a career in STEM, what does the stem process look like of experimenting, ruining things, having trial and error, how to use materials conservatively, so it gives that exposure at a young age,” Dhir says. “…Companies like Intel and Honda are bringing factories here and they're wanting kids to come out of high school and go and work in the manufacturing plants they’re making.”
Over time there are some aspects of the escape rooms that have been enhanced, including the addition of checkpoints to make sure each child in a group is learning and not just following the steps of another teammate.
STEMscapes hopes to continue improving its methods and expand its educational method outside of STEM topics and traditional classrooms into places such as after-school programs and other science spaces.
“Hopefully, we (can) also partner with science centers and museums to have engineered escape rooms that are established in their location, so when students come in, alongside the exhibits, they could work through problems in real-time to test their knowledge, which I think would be a really cool addition through all the three fields of education that are primarily emphasized.”
When looking back on his own childhood, Dhir remembers the impact others had on him when he moved to Dublin from Atlanta while in middle school. He says if it weren’t for his educational experience, his fellow Dublin alums and the values instilled in him by his community, he wouldn’t have had the courage and inspiration to create this successful nonprofit as a teenager.
“Coming into Dublin made me realize that there’s a lot of emphasis not just on academics with STEM, but anything that you’re interested in,” Dhir says. “Dublin is one of the few places where you’re in an environment where it’s almost encouraged to take all these risks.”
Maisie Fitzmaurice is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at mfitzmaurice@cityscenemediagroup.com.
