Revere High School added a new engineering class to the 2022-2023 school year curriculum in order to provide the final piece of the four-year STEM program. 

Joseph Silvestri, Revere High School’s STEM/Technology teacher, partnered with Project Lead the Way (PLTW) and their program/coursework to create the new Engineering, Design and Development class. 

The first third of the course is research and exploration based; the middle third is design and construction, and the final portion of the year focuses on testing, documentation and presentation. The full-year course has students work toward a final capstone project aimed at fixing a problem within their community

Senior Andrew Froelich has taken all four STEM classes available at Revere and commented on the innovative format of the class, stating that the students will work in groups of three to create a working prototype. 

The first three STEM classes: Intro to Engineering and Design, Principles of Engineering, and Civil Engineering and Architecture, focus more on learning principles; however, they still prepare students for the final capstone project. The students learn content in past classes that aids them in creating solutions to engineering-related problems seen in the world today.

“We’re taking what we already learned in the past and applying it now,” Froelich said.

Silvestri works to provide his students with real-life experiences to prepare them for the engineering world, stating that they use critical thinking and problem-solving skills every day in his class when they may only be used occasionally in other environments.

“[Students] have to reach out to experts in the community…and they have to work with experts too,” Silvestri said.

By the time STEM students graduate, given that they have taken all four classes in order, they will leave Revere with an Honors STEM diploma. Silvestri worked to include all mandated requirements into his four courses.

“There’s college credit they could have earned…learning entry level college curriculum,” Silvestri said. 

Top educators and professionals actively working in engineering fields wrote this course.

However, the STEM program has struggled in recent years to run every class. Jennifer Seegert, a 25-year art instructor at Revere, absorbed some of the technological aspects of Silvestri’s coursework by creating/adapting multiple courses–namely Digital Art and Design and Digital Cartooning and Animation.

“We have a lot of things to offer, but not a lot of people to offer them…Over the past decade or so especially, [arts and technology] have kind of blended together,” Seegert said.

Similarly to Silvestri, she works to integrate elements of tech into art classes to prepare her students for the workforce.

“We want to offer a little bit of that technology so that students who are interested in going into those fields will at least have a little bit of background when they go off to college,”  Seegert said. 

Both Silvestri and Seegert have worked to provide their students with as many classes they are interested in as possible, working together on a crossover between technology and the arts, while still creating various new and different opportunities for all students.