MADISON – Recently, St. Anthony School, in partnership with Level Up Village, launched their global partnership, the first Level Up Partnership in Mississippi. Dedicated to building a sustained STEM environment inside and outside of the classroom, St. Anthony educators partnered with Level Up Village to work with schools across the world and share their STEM focused program with children in developing countries.
Level Up Village (LUV) delivers pioneering Global STEAM (STEM + Arts) enrichment courses that promote design thinking and one-to-one collaboration on real-world problems between K-9 students in the U.S. and partner students in developing countries.
Kristian Beatty, development director at St. Anthony School, said children work with student partners near the same grade level in developing countries and share their projects, ideas, and thought processes in this global outreach STEM program. “Students and teachers and their global partners communicate via the Level Up internet-based platform through video messaging.

St. Anthony students (l-r) Walt Williams, Zoie Jewusiak and Philip Smith work dissecting a heart during science class. (Photo by Kristian Beatty)

This semester the school is enrolled in three Level Up Village courses:
Second graders are participating in “Global Storybook Engineers” in partnership with students from India and Nicaragua. Beatty said students engineer solutions to rescue storybook heroes while sharing the results of their design challenges with global partners and learning about each other’s lives and cultures in the process.
Fifth graders are engaged in “Global Inventors” in partnership with students from Pakistan and Ghana. Beatty explained that in this project students learn to harness the power of 3D printing and use Computer Aided Design (CAD) software to create and modify a series of designs to produce and 3D print a solar-powered light source in collaboration with their global partner.
Sixth graders are acting as “Global Doctors,” anatomy in partnership with students from Pakistan and Uganda. Students explore the intricacies of the human body systems through real animal specimen dissections. “As “global doctors,” they dissect specimens such as a frog, sheep’s heart, grasshopper, earthworm, and shark,” said Beatty.
Students learn about their global partners’ daily lives and discuss the global diseases that affect specific body systems.
“St. Anthony’s partnership with Level Up enhances their STEM program as students, teachers and global partners work together to develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills,” noted Beatty. “These skills and their core subject knowledge are then utilized to identify community and global issues and find lasting solutions.” Their partnership will continue in the spring as the entire school will work together on a school-wide project with Level Up Village.
(Story and photos courtesy of Kristian Beatty)