Skateboard Designing Teaches Tulsa Students STEM Principles

Someone in Tulsa has successfully created a camp that encourages creativity and problem solving as well as incorporates science, technology, engineer and math. It’s they Build Your Own Skateboard camp, or B.Y.O.S.

Fab Lab Tulsa, along with the Tulsa regional STEM Alliance, TCC and the Schusterman Foundation are hosting the skateboard camp.

"We're building skateboards, but what we are really doing is training kids to be creative, critical thinkers and world class problem solvers, because they face a million problems with this project," said Xan Black with the Tulsa Alliance for Engineering.

One of those problems is the design. It's got to fit on the board so they have to use proportion and scale, practical uses for math and engineering.

Fab Lab advisors help with the machines and once the students figure that out, they are off. The camp is free and currently full with 17 campers, from middle school and high school, including three girls.

The designs were awesome and so was their eagerness to show what they had learned; making stencils, drilling holes, creating a one of a kind skateboard.

The camp started Monday and will finish Friday.