The culmination of a year of work was on display on the Kirbo Center Thursday evening as students from throughout Decatur County showed off their STEM projects. The projects ranged from game design and robotics to hydroponic plants and hydraulic bridges and everything in between.

The show included students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Each group had a display and they were prepared to answer questions about what they learned.

“We made a cave and we made some leaves,” kindergartner Mayra Gomez said about her project on petroglyphs. “The Indians carved on caves. They wanted to tell the story about their lives.”

For their project they learned about and then made petroglyphs, which are prehistoric cave drawings.

A group of seventh and eighth graders learned to build and grow plants in a hydroponic system. They grew tomatoes plants and collard greens.

“Basically its just growing plants in water,” seventh grader Lizzy Thompson said.

The exhibition gave community members and parents the chance to see what the students had been working on all year long.

“They work on designing and creating and exploring,” Dr. April Aldridge said. “With STEM you are using science, technology, engineering and math working in an integrated fashion to design, imagine and create and solve problems in the real world.”

A group of fifth graders from Hutto-Middle School focused their project on building awareness for the tourism attractions throughout Georgia.

“We did our project about Georgia tourism based on the idea that everything is peachy in Georgia,” Ahmari Borden said. “It means we are trying to get people to come visit our popular tourist attractions.”

Their project consisted of making a PowerPoint and making pamphlets to promote tourism.

Dr. Aldridge credited Dr. Suzi Bonifay, whose retirement celebration was held in conjunction with the exhibition, with promoting the STEM programs in Decatur County.