New STEM camp helps create engineering minded workforce

Yahoo

19-07-2025

MORGANTOWN — Claire Drainer was already dominating at rockets as captain of her East Fairmont High rocketry team, so she tried balloons next.
Drainer was one of 17 girls at a new week long summer camp called SpaceTrek, held at the West Virginia University Statler College of Engineering.
'It's amazing, it's a really good opportunity,' Drainer said. 'You get to meet a lot of really nice people and you get to do a lot of things you wouldn't normally get to do.'
SpaceTrek originated at Kentucky's Morehead State University, primarily designed to bring more women into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It's made for young women entering grades 9-12 or their first year of college. Professor David Martinelli imported the program from Morehead to WVU, intending to adapt it for Appalachian needs. This is its first year here.
The program itself teaches basic space systems engineering. The girls learn the fundamentals of electronics, wave motion and the electromagnetic spectrum, among other disciplines, as they put together a cricket satellite for launch aboard a balloon.
The balloons climb as high as six kilometers into the atmosphere. After the launch, the team acts as a ground station, by pointing an antenna into the sky and picking up the radio signals the satellite puts out. The girls then use those signals to chart how the radio frequency the satellite is transmitting on changes as it ascends.
State Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia County, had to rally after graft funding for the program didn't come through in time. Typically, the program recruits during the fall semester for summer session. Oliverio, along with his wife Melissa, wrote to 54 West Virginia school superintendents and reached out to faculty, principals and STEM clubs. Word reached Drainer's grandmother, who told her granddaughter about it. On Thursday, Drainer's grandmother and her grandfather, Ed Buckner, were on hand to show support.
'I think this is a good opportunity for these kids to be introduced to STEM and be involved in STEM,' Buckner said. 'It's a good opportunity because girls would not be exposed to this kind of environment, with the training they get in the classroom. For instance, soldering and electricy, things like that. There's not an opportunity for them in everyday life to be exposed to that.'
Melissa Oliverio knows first hand the value of programs aimed at young women. In her youth, she attended debate camp at Wake Forest, which sowed the seeds for her to enter law school later. Now as an adult, and despite the fact she wasn't a STEM student, she wanted to make a similar experience available to other young women in rural counties.
'I believe in the value of women learning with other women,' she said. 'This is just a tremendous opportunity, and we just had to try to help get the word out.'
Martinelli said the majority of the girls came from McDowell and Mingo counties. Martinelli said those are some areas that have a disconnect with WVU and the school would love to increase the awareness of higher education there. Having the parents there on the first day of the camp was valuable, and after touring the engineering complex, the parents walked away understanding the value of sending their kids to college.
Three of the girls came from East Fairmont High.
Wes Deadrick, director of NASA's Katherine Johnson IV&V facility in the I-79 High Tech Park in Fairmont, was also present watching the balloon launches.
'You can spend a lot of time in the classroom and lab, but this is really where the rubber hits the road out here,' he said.
Although the NASA facility does more work with software coding and ensuring no mission-ending errors are propagating before a mission launch, and not balloons or atmosphere science, he said programs like SpaceTrek create an important STEM pipeline that gets students excited with the hands-on applications.
'It gives us an engineering-minded workforce, having students that are homegrown that we can pull from the area,' Deadrick said. 'We'd love to hire West Virginians. They're dedicated, hard-working, have some grit and they tend to stay with us.'
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