Rising high school senior Deven Butani founded STEMPower Network to increase science, technology, engineering and math education for underserved students.
“In terms of STEM, it shows you the way the world works, and so much that we don’t know about the world can be harnessed to benefit us,” the Moorestown resident said.
Butani attends the Princeton International School of Mathematics and Science (PRISMS), a co-educational, independent boarding and day school. While the institution values STEM, its teachers and leaders also place equal emphasis on the cultivation of student abilities in world languages, the humanities and arts, leadership and other areas critical to a young person’s growth, according to the PRISMS website.
“It’s such a close-knit community,” Butani noted of PRISMS. “You’re friends with almost everyone there and you’re able to form such a close bond with so many people there, as opposed to seeing a bunch of different people in all of your classes.
“I’d say there are definitely perks to either, but … I definitely got a lot out of having such a small, but a very close-knit community within my school.”
When Butani was a freshman at PRISMS, he sought volunteer opportunities and came across the Margaret Donnelly O’Connor Education Center. The 30-plus elementary- and middle-school students who come to the center live in the Ethel R. Lawrence Homes, an affordable housing complex in Mount Laurel, according to the STEMPower Network website.
Butani started as a math tutor and a coding club leader at the center, but he observed a lack of those same hands-on projects that made him passionate about STEM. The first STEM sessions were started after that, and the positive reception from students prompted Butani to create a makerspace at the center.
“A makerspace is just a space where students have a bunch of materials at their disposal to be able to create whatever they want,” he explained. “They have a bunch of materials like LEGOs, popsicle sticks, construction paper – almost any little craft material that you can think of that they can use coming into that center at any time to make whatever they want and innovate as they please.”
A tie-dye STEM session at the Beverly library run by Deven Butani and Sonia Leo, a rising junior at Moorestown High.
State Sen. Troy Singleton and his chief of staff, Jennifer Aydjian, helped fund the makerspace, the first location where the STEMpower Network ran its sessions. Butani wanted to expand his initiative to other communities, so after connecting with librarians from the Beverly, Willingboro and Hamilton Township public libraries, he recruited STEM-driven high-school students to help lead sessions at the three sites.
Singleton’s summer lunch program has also helped the STEMPower Network connect with various communities, including Palmyra, Cinnaminson, Delran and Bordentown, among others.
“We’ve made so much progress in the past few months already being in four different locations (the aforementioned libraries and the O’Connor center),” Butani observed, “and with the interest that I’ve gotten from other students … I can only see it going up from here.”
For more information about STEMPower Network, visit www.stempowernetwork.org.
