Design project taps kids’ STEAM skills

The miniature city stretched across the length of the Thunder Ridge Middle School library, its carefully crafted spires, office buildings and thoroughfares dazzling in their complexity.

Visitors to the school took on the appearance of lumbering giants making their way through a scene from “Gulliver’s Travels.”

On one table, a building-by-building re-creation of downtown Denver drew careful examination from students and teachers alike.

On another table, individual cityscapes, structures, railroad spikes and other creations on a small scale served as unique exhibitions.

It was all part of the school’s “Geo Towns” display, a culminating event that served to spotlight seventh-graders’ work this past school year incorporating science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) studies in a single, intensive project.

“We let the kids design the dream town where they would like to live,” said Katie Kidd, a seventh-grade math teacher at Thunder Ridge who helped coordinate the project. “They constructed a theme, they had to come up with a proposal and get it approved. From there, they had to follow guidelines, identify shapes and make their idea come to life.”

Using a rough scale of 1 centimeter of model space for every 10 feet of actual space, the students used complex architectural software for the design and realized their plans with paper, cardboard and recycled materials. The students also creat