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HomeSportsAPSU Lady Govs Basketball play Middle Tennessee Wednesday morning at Dunn Center

APSU Lady Govs Basketball play Middle Tennessee Wednesday morning at Dunn Center

Austin Peay State University Lady Govs - APSUClarksville, TN – When Austin Peay State University women’s basketball team hosts Middle Tennessee, the crowd won’t just be there for a basketball game.

The 11:00am, Wednesday tip-off will bely a day-long Education Day initiative at the Dunn Center, with Austin Peay athletics partnered with Clarksville-Montgomery County School System’s STEM Education Coalition, a nation-wide organization aiming to improve the way student’s learn science, mathematics, technology and engineering.

Austin Peay Women's Basketball hosts MTSU on Wednesday morning. (APSU Sports Information)
Austin Peay Women’s Basketball hosts MTSU on Wednesday morning. (APSU Sports Information)

More than 400 local elementary school students will be on hand, participating in the APSU STEM Challenge. Local students have been hard at work since the beginning of the fall semester, culminating in Wednesday’s event at the Dunn Center.

Teams from each school – which have spent the semester on a container-building project designed to teach the students about the effects of volume and math – will compete to see which designs hold liquid the best during a race across the Dunn Center floor.

“We wanted to bring our students to a ballgame, but we wanted to tie it into an educational event,” said Dale Rudolph, STEM Coordinator for CMCSS. “The students competed at their school to determine who solved the challenge the best, and the teams who had the best answers are coming to Austin Peay to compete against other schools.

“We have had a tremendous response and our students are super-excited. Between athletics and Austin Peay’s STEM center, which Dr. (Martha) McIlveene is in charge of, we’ve had a good cooperative project. This will probably be the first trip to a college campus for a lot of our students, and they are so very excited about attending this event.”

“This is an opportunity where we have been able to use a community resource such as Austin Peay,” said B.J. Worthington, CMCSS Director of Schools. “This mutually collaborative effort provides our students learning opportunities while exposing them to post-secondary experiences on a college campus. Most importantly, this STEM challenge was designed to allow for real-life applications of our standards, such as the physical properties of matter, multiplication and division.”

Preliminary races for the event begin early in the morning at the Dunn Center, with the final races concluding at halftime of the Lady Govs contest against Middle Tennessee.

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