Cache Makers creates STEM experience for kids

In 2013, Joel Duffin and Kevin Reeve, both Utah State University alumni, began a group called Cache Makers for kids ages 11 to 17. Cache Makers is a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) program that teaches kids a range of skills from soldering to programming to Lego robotics.

Now there are extra-curricular activities for kids to participate in besides dance, sports, art, band.

“(Joel and I) got together one time and said, ‘Gosh, what can we do?’ because we’ve heard both our governor and other industry leaders say that there are not enough programmers out there or other people in the STEM field. There is just more demand than there are workers,” said Kevin Reeve, director for the Academic and Instructional Services at USU.

After hearing this, Reeve and Duffin used what they had to start a group that would get kids interested in the tech world.

“As we were getting together we were thinking we really love to do what we do and that is play with technology, program, build robots and things like that. How could we share that passion with kids?” Reeve said.

The group quickly was a success, not only with the kids that participated, but also with parents who wanted their kids to be involved in STEM projects.

“Within a couple of weeks word had spread and we had 17 kids and we had to cap it because we had this small space we were meeting. Other adults that wanted their kids to participate stepped forward and said, ‘Hey, we’ll start another group.’ Within the first six months we started two new groups meeting on different days of the week, and now it’s expanded to the point that we have had 500 kids participate just since last June,” Reeve said.

Reeve and Duffin soon found ways to effectively teach the kids, but still let them discover how to program on their own.

“We used a technology developed at MIT called SCRATCH. It’s a programming language that is meant for kids, visually oriented, drag and drop that teaches them concepts of programming. We saw how quickly that was a hit with them and how easy it was for them to learn it,” Reeve said.

A large part of the classes are giving feedback and having students help each other solve problems. Students will split up into groups of two and talk about their projects. At the end of the classes, the instructor will ask the students what struggles they had during their projects. Other students can contribute and help each other solve problems.

But Reeve and Duffin have wondered what could have attributed to the quick success of Cache Makers.

“There’s nothing like this around. There has been a big push by our governor to get more STEM into schools and elementary and middle schools and high school,” Reeve said.

Parents also wanted their kids who were interested in technology to attend the group, which is unique to its kind in Cache Valley.

Johnathan Powell, an Assistant Program Coordinator at Cache Makers and a USU student majoring in computer engineering enjoys learning while finding ways to teach the participants more about the tech world.

“It’s way fun. I have learned way more than any of the kids that I’ve taught here. As I am planning a group, it is not limited to what I know. I am encouraged to go and find something I don’t know that I’d like to know, teach myself how to do it, and then teach the kids how to do it,” Powell said.

Sam Wild, a returning student and a current participant in the Cache Makers Coding Club, said one of his favorite projects was the Lego robotics course.

“It was fun experimenting trying to make it work. I tried like 300 times to get one thing to work. I was trying to make a truck go down a rail and collect something and then dump it at the end of the rail, then return to the corner,” Wild said.

—roniastephen@gmail.com

@RoniALake