Aldine Middle Students Attend ‘Passport to Your Future’ Career Forum

Aldine Middle School [icons icon_name=”icon-external-link” icon_size=”14px”]students with an interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers attended the Passport to Your Future forum held at Lone Star College-University Park on February 28. The Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce and the Workforce Development Committee coordinate the event annually.

Passport to Your Future gives students an opportunity to learn more about various career clusters. The forum on Feb. 28 focused on STEM careers.

Other universities and colleges represented at the forum included Lone Star College, Prairie View A&M University, Sam Houston State University, Texas Southern University and University of Houston-Downtown.

Franklin Higgins, director of from Aldine ISD’s [icons icon_name=”icon-external-link” icon_size=”14px”]Career and Technical Education Department, as well as program directors Angela Whorton and Greg Harper were also present.

During the five-hour forum, students had an opportunity to learn from college-level STEM instructors, receive relevant career path information and engage in career cluster-related activities.

One of the hands-on activities had students making crazy putty or yak in a science lab.

The students mixed borax, water, glue and food coloring together to create the substance that resulted in a rubber ball they could take home. Glue is a polymer. Polymers are like a bunch of tiny chains inside the glue that keep from flowing like a regular liquid, and help it stick to things. When they mixed in the, borax, it acted like a linker, connecting and extending all the little polymer chains of glue to form a bunch of much longer chains. All this chain lengthening stiffens the glue and water mix, and makes it much harder to move around.

Below are some additional images of the students.