Rapid Sustainment Office and UDRI expand annual STEAM Day

Published May 19, 2025
By Tech Sgt Mikaley Kline

Beavercreek, Ohio – Approximately 130 students from Oakview Elementary School and Beavertown Elementary School spent two separate days at the Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) to partake in an annual Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) event in Beavercreek, Ohio, on May 7, 2025. This year marked the first time this event expanded to include a second school. Both schools are in Kettering, Ohio.

The Rapid Sustainment Office is part of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) and a division within the new Combat Readiness Directorate.

The University of Dayton Research Institute’s (UDRI) Sustainment Technologies Transition Division along with RSO partnered with the schools to create a hands-on activity of assembling and testing a small wind turbine.

“We are here today to help expose the students at a younger age to engineering, science and math and how that can tie into the arts and everything else,” said Brian Stitt, UDRI Sustainment Technologies Transition Division department head. “With this exposure I think they’re able to look ahead and see how this could be something they could do in the future. We just want to make this event fun and memorable for them.”

Colton, a third-grade student from Beavertown, enjoyed participating in the STEAM Day.

“Building and testing the design was my favorite part of the day,” Colton said. “I had a lot of fun today.”

Stitt mentioned that it was Kristy Fairfax, a workforce development lead with the UDRI’s Digital Transformation Center, who was pivotal in the addition of a second school for the STEAM event.

“When we brought Kristy on, she said, ‘Why don’t we scale this?’ and I agreed that we should talk about it,” Stitt said. “So, she helped us facilitate a way to do that. We’ve always had this vision of being able to make this event bigger. We’d love to reach across different school systems, but we needed to conduct a trial run to see if it was possible within the same school district first.”

Oakview Elementary School had their STEAM Day on May 5th and Beavertown Elementary School conducted theirs on May 7th.

“We learned some lessons from the first day the students were here and applied some of that knowledge toward the second day,” explained Stitt. “Kristy brings a more procedural aspect to the event which helps us document our processes to better set our program in stone.”

Fairfax was excited about the inclusion of a second school and emphasized the importance of career connected learning.

“Coming from a background in workforce development, I see just how important career connected learning is and it truly has an impact on student accomplishment and achievement as well as student hope,” Fairfax said. “It helps them achieve more. We know that students need either a degree or some sort of post-secondary skill and students who are more engaged and have that hope are more likely to achieve that.”

For Fairfax, reaching more students while using the same amount of resources was her goal.

“We had a second day here [at RSO], but by bringing in high school students really enabled us to do that,” she said. “It gives the students more of a near peer mentorship opportunity for both the high schoolers and the third graders. The third graders can see themselves more easily in high school pursuing the engineering career technical program than someone much further down the down-the-line in their career.”

This was the first time high school students from the Kettering Fairmont Career Technology Center program helped facilitate the event. These students are required to complete work-based learning hours as part of their curriculum.

“[The program] starts in 11th grade for students and it’s a pathway that articulates into college credit and the program at Kettering Fairmont is pretty robust, adds Fairfax “The juniors take on a facilitating role to work with the third graders so that we didn’t need as many engineers.”

The team also welcomed other potential partners to witness the event and gain experience to help expand the event in the future.