Award Winning STEM Outreach
Our summer camps provide week-long, standards-based experiences for 2,000 youth per year in grades 3-10. All camps are taught by Nebraska certified teachers.
The planetarium utilizes an innovative and nationally-recognized "Interactive Immersion" model to provide STEM experiences to 12,000 visitors per year.
The Nebraska Science Olympiad runs a series of STEM competitions and supports over 90 teams and 1,400 middle and high school students per year.
Undergraduate students bring standards-based STEM activities to K-8th graders, impacting more than 8,000 kids and 200 undergraduates.
Outreach Programming as Research Infrastructure
Our outreach programming serves as sandboxes for innovations in K-12 STEM education research and broad-impacts infrastructure for UNO faculty. Disciplinary and education researchers create, pilot, refine, and assess innovations, with programs also serving as recruitment, retention, and service-learning tools for UNO STEM majors.
The STEM TRAIL Center also provides logistical support for other programming across the UNO campus. We have an experienced informal education staff that provides support services for faculty running programming centered on STEM education.
| Outreach Programs Supported by the STEM TRAIL Center | |
|---|---|
| WiSTEM |
WiSTEM stands for Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The WiSTEM organization advances the full and successful participation and inclusion of all persons within academic professions by addressing gender equity, recruitment and retention, awards and recognition, and career advancement and satisfaction. |
| Teacher-Researcher Partnership Program (TRPP) | The Teacher-Researcher Partnership Program (TRPP), which gives an opportunity for teachers from surrounding public schools to assist in research while paired with research faculty from UNO. |
| EUREKA! | EUREKA! is a STEM camp for girls that begins for them the summer before eighth grade and supports them throughout high school while continuously strengthening their interest in STEM. UNO emphasizes outreach programs that share interest in STEM with surrounding area public schools. |
| Nebraska GenCyber | Nebraska GenCyber Camp (NGC) for middle school students is a free 5-day summer camp for students in the 5th to 8th grades. NGC has a theme of female empowerment and is funded by a federal grant from the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation. |
Much of this work is supported by grants initiated through collaborations with STEM TRAIL Center personnel; see our research page for information on these grants.
If you’re interested in volunteering, participating in outreach via research projects, or are looking for collaborators, please contact us!