It has been quite a year at the Tapia Center.  In this letter, I would like to share my highlights of the year, both about the reach of our programs, and about several of our brand new creations. 

As always, we have strived to:

• Create STEM projects that are original, hands-on, and relevant.
• Deliver summer camps that inspire kids to pursue STEM.
• Help educators improve their craft with professional development that is challenging and fun. 

Tapia Carbon Project

This year, we saw the Tapia Carbon Project blossom.  In this project, students use pasta, Play-Doh, and vegetable oil to build a model reservoir for storing carbon dioxide underground.  The challenge is to store as much vegetable oil (acting as liquid carbon dioxide) as possible in their reservoir without having a leak. It provides a context for students to visualize Carbon Capture and Storage, an important tool for combating climate change, all while reinforcing essential skills in science, mathematics, and engineering.  As a result of the Center’s efforts, the Tapia Carbon Project was completed by:

• 120 elementary school students
• 449 middle school students
• 630 high school students
• 64 college students
• 270 industry professionals
• 112 K-12 educators

As you can imagine, the hands-on nature of the Tapia Carbon Project make it appealing for a wide range of audiences.  Further, it can be adapted to fit anywhere from a 1 hour session to a week long program.    It has been delightful to see the same spark of joy in a 4th grader and in an ExxonMobil engineer when they successfully stored carbon in their reservoir without a leak.  We are actively seeking new partners to bring the carbon project to even more people next year.

[The Carbon Project was] highly engaging and connected beautifully to the Engineering Design Process, making the lesson both meaningful and memorable.

2025 Summer STEM Camps

The Tapia Center’s marquee program is our week-long residential STEM summer camp for middle and high school students.  Comparable to past years, we had over 400 middle and high school students attending, primarily from Texas but from as far away as England, Japan, China, South Korea, and Thailand.  True to our mission, our program was able to raise funds to support 34% of students from low-income backgrounds, who learned alongside 29% of campers that were able to pay directly.  We also partnered with 4 other universities to bring summer camp experiences to hundreds of students from middle school through college.  We thank generous funding from ExxonMobil and from HEB for making this possible for our students.  Further funding was provided by Rob Kaplan, Kathie Hiebert-Dodd, Caroline Baker, and over 35 donors from our annual 24-hour challenge fundraising effort. We also thank Goya for providing scientists who showed our campers how STEM is vital for the safety of the food they eat.

One thing I am particularly excited about this past year was the delivery of a special section of Tapia Camps.  It was built on the “Techniques of a Pro Mathematician” curriculum that I developed, and it is intended for college-bound students who plan to major in a math-based field.  It helps the students develop their skills and strategies for learning advanced mathematics, and it is built around a series of hands-on activities.  For example, one task students did was use their cell phone to play a sound of exactly 440 Hertz while their classmate played a sound of 441 Hertz. When they did this, a very cool acoustic effect happens, and it is deeply related to formulas from trigonometry.  Not only that, it provides a perfect setting to learn how to understand formulas qualitatively, an important skill in being able to understand those formulas.  

[The Techniques program] wasn’t just learning formulas […] we actually understood every part of the equation. We could memorize them because we understood them.

Educator Professional Development (PD)

In Summer 2025, we continued our yearly tradition of providing week-long professional development for educators of all grades and all subject areas.  We had 26 educators from Texas and Louisiana join us to learn about Project-Based Learning (PBL), build PBL projects for their classrooms, and expand their network of fellow educators.  

One particularly exciting PD project we completed this year was at SOWELA Technical Community College in Southwest Louisiana.  We created and delivered a week-long PD for 36 Louisiana educators based on hands-on STEM activities related to the theme of energy.  Educators measured the effectiveness of solar panels based on their angle relative to the sun, designed a wind turbine to the heaviest cup of beans, created a model carbon storage reservoir, and engineered a heatsink that melts an ice cube as fast as possible.  The educators then adapted one of these projects for their classroom. Not only that, their teachers had the opportunity to receive feedback from industry professionals about those very projects.

[The Professional Development program] is incredibly engaging. ... I have learned so many things in a short amount of time. I’m just very ... excited about all the possibilities

At the Tapia Center, we completed so many programs that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of!  It would be possible without the incredible people at the Center.  Over 39 college and graduate students, from a wide range of backgrounds and mostly from Rice, helped deliver our on campus programs.  I want to thank each of them.  I’d like to thank the Center’s year-round staff for developing, planning, and delivering our incredible programs.  And finally, I’d like to thank Dr. Richard Tapia for making all of this possible.  All of our programs try to live by a message he tells all our campers who are exploring STEM as a passion or a potential career: Si, se puede, yes, you can.  

— Paul Hand, Ph.D., Executive Director, Tapia Center