Wiikwemkoong high school teacher recognized with Prime Minister Award
By Rick Garrick
THUNDER BAY—Wasse Abin Wikwemikong High School teacher Chris Mara was recently recognized with a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence for putting First Nations students on the map in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
“It was a great honour to be among such an amazing group of people from across Canada,” Mara says about the May 2 awards ceremony in Ottawa. “It was also a great honour to have recognition of what is happening in First Nations education around STEM.”
Mara was recognized for the Wasse Abin Wikwemikong High School robotics team’s accomplishment in qualifying for the quarterfinals and winning the Highest Rookie Seed and Rookie Inspiration Awards at a First Robotics Competition this past winter.
“This is our fourth year, which makes us the longest running established all First Nations robotics team,” Mara says. “We started four years ago with hand tools on the lab bench in the back of my classroom with five students, and we’ve grown to a team of 20-plus students in a school of 150-200 students.”
Mara says the robotics team now has their own build room to design and build their own industrial robot for First Robotics Competitions.
“Our robot is a serious industrial robot — they can be up to 120 pounds and move about 15 feet per second,” Mara says. “We do everything from the design and the manufacturing through to the coding. This past year we won the Engineering Inspiration Award at the Georgian College Robotics event.”
Mara was also recognized for stressing the possibilities for girls in STEM, with girls playing leadership roles on the school’s robotics team. Mara also drove a group of girls across the province to attend a conference to hear inspirational speakers, do team-building activities and learn about STEM career opportunities.
“Our team has always had young women in positions of leadership in all aspects of the project,” Mara says, noting that girls make up the majority of the team. “Our two robot drivers on our drive team were two young women. Unless you had an all-girls team, you didn’t really see that. Most of the drivers were males so it’s amazing to see the leadership and the confidence that our young women have.”
Mara was recognized as well for his teaching approach of using hands-on practical experiences to find interactive ways to support students in STEM learning.
“My teaching approach is to give my students as rich an experience as they can in their learning and try a variety of strategies to make them successful,” Mara says. “What I find with the robotics program, what’s great, is that it is very project based by its nature. So it is a rich multi-layered, multi-faceted project where you can come at it from all kinds of different perspectives, a business perspective and its set of criteria, a manufacturing technology perspective and its set of criteria, a computer science perspective and its set of provincial criteria.”
Mara was one of 18 educators who were presented with Certificates of Excellence by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau also recognized 46 educators who will receive Certificates of Achievement at local events.
“Inspiring, motivating and igniting curiosity — that’s the power of our hard-working Canadian teachers,” says Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, who joined Trudeau at the awards ceremony. “They are not only equipping young Canadians with knowledge and skills they will need but also nurturing a lifelong curiosity and passion for learning. They’re making dreams come true.”