Author: Mikaila Fluth
Last spring, the Dakota State University campus buzzed with an infectious sense of creativity, humor, amazement, and discovery every afternoon. 144 K–8 students from Madison Central School District came to DSU twice monthly to get a taste of the CybHER After-School Program — an interactive, hands-on experience designed to generate interest in STEM and form life-long abilities.
To keep learning age-appropriate and focused, students visited campus by grade levels: 5th and 6th graders occupied the hallways on Mondays, Kindergarteners and 1st graders on Tuesdays, and 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders on Thursdays on rotation. Our 7th and 8th-graders visited occasionally for more advanced sessions that suited their growing technical skills and interests. Girls did the Code & Create path, and boys did the Bricks n Bots. Both courses navigated the same carefully crafted activities to provide equal access to STEM discovery and learning. Each session was packed with meticulously designed lessons that combined creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. Students didn’t sit and listen; they built, coded, experimented, and played through each challenge.
Highlights of the Semester:
- Bots to Life: With some basic motors, batteries, and an innovative spin, students created and built functional robots and mechanical contraptions. The experiments taught fundamental engineering concepts and encouraged problem-solving and design refinement.
- Decoding with Binary: Kids learned binary code, the language of computers, by creating personalized bracelets that encoded their initials in beads. Hands-on learning brought abstract ideas to life as colorful, wearable works of art.
- Robots in Action: Programming small robots like Ozobots, Dash, and Sphero’s to navigate obstacle courses and paths gave students a playful way to learn sequencing, commands, and logic. Watching their robots perform instructions was always met with applause and delight.
- Coding Games and Stories: Older students started coding using Scratch and Python’s Turtle graphics, creating interactive stories and visible code. These exercises extended computational thinking and introduced them to the joy of coding as a storytelling tool.
- Circuit Explorations: With Snap Circuits and Micro: Bits, students gained hands-on experience connecting hardware and software. These activities brought the inner workings of everyday technology out into the open and within their reach.
- Cracking Codes: To round out the semester, students solved escape-room type cryptography puzzles—unraveling mysteries that familiarized them with the fundamentals of encryption and cybersecurity in an entertaining, collaborative format.
The middle school students also had the great fortune of engaging with the DSU DigFORCE team and learning more about digital forensics and cybersecurity careers. Being able to observe these young minds debating intelligently data privacy, investigation techniques, and ethical hacking was a powerful validation of how well-rounded and motivated our students are becoming.
This was never just an after-school club. It was a catapult. Throughout the semester, we watched kids construct with every flickering LED, every line of code debugged, and every robotic movement programmed.
As we gear up for the 2025–2026 academic year, CybHER is excited to bring many more students to the campus of DSU. We’ve started planning new events, expanding our mentor pool, and doubling down on our efforts to empower the next generation of tech leaders in South Dakota.
Stay tuned for additional adventures, additional innovation, and additional tales of discovery. Until then, keep coding, keep creating, and keep dreaming big!