Westwood Junior High recently held its third annual MST-Ed talks. More than three dozen professionals from across DFW and beyond presented potential STEM career paths to students.
Michael Capps has been developing video games for 24 years since interning at Texas Instruments while at SMU. His daughter attended Westwood, which is RISD’s math, science, and leadership magnet, and he has been coming to the MST-Ed talks because he enjoys seeing the students get excited about a subject that has been his life’s passion.
“It provides a creative outlet, as I put together a demo to challenge the kids and demonstrate the coding and debugging process,” Capps said. “It also gives me a chance to practice speaking in front of a new audience each year.”
This year’s group was inquisitive and responsive as Capps let them play a game while he showed the students how to change the code to make the game function better.
The Westwood students select the MST-Ed talks they want to attend, and Patricia Abouabdo, the Campus Instructions Technology Specialist, builds a schedule to ensure students are exposed to as many career paths as possible.
In addition to various architecture and engineering sessions, Westwood students learned more about prosthetics, STEM in real estate, and technology used in healthcare, as well as a journey into computational chemistry.
