Share your spark: How Spark Program helps middle school students

Recently, Spark Program hosted the Share Your Spark event at Facebook in Menlo Park. Share Your Spark is a celebration of learning and community where students and mentors participating in Spark’s mentorship program showcase their career and interest-driven projects in a science-fair style setting. Projects ranged from building drones, to self-walking programmable LED smart shoes, to a business plan for an organization to give back to local animal shelters.

Fifty 7th graders from Ravenswood Middle School and more than 50 working mentors from Facebook, Google, Pure Storage, and IONpath attended the Share Your Spark event.

Spark is a national organization that brings communities together by providing career exploration opportunities for middle school students. In the Bay Area, Spark works with 500+ students in San Francisco and East Palo Alto.

During Spark’s year-long program, 7th grade students are exposed to different careers, industries and caring adults. For Spark’s spring semester, students are paired with mentors at various tech companies based on shared interests and skills, and have the opportunity to work for three months on an interest/career-driven project of their choice.

Samantha Scheetz contributed to this report;  Recent M-A grad Elize Kratzer is a Spark intern.