Whiz Kids: The Next Generation of High-Tech Makers

Step inside a STEAM center — this new crop of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math spaces are designed with young minds in mind.

By Rachel Chang
Photographs by William Mebane

Grant Cox (left) and Kai Clunis (right) with instructor Sakhi Patel.

The familiar soundtrack of hide-and-seek fills the air. “She’ll never find me — I’m hiding so well!” shouts Kai Clunis, prompting giggles and yelps. But this game has a twist. The 11-year-old isn’t dodging classmates on a school playground. She’s hiding in cyberspace, in a hole that she dug via programming on ­Minecraft.

It’s a Friday afternoon at Zaniac, a STEAM-based (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) learning center for kindergartners through eighth graders in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Clunis is gearing up for an afternoon of educational enrichment classes disguised as playtime. Kids’ creativity is taking center stage in next-gen makerspaces like Zaniac, focused on high-tech, hands-on gadgetry including robotics, computer programming, and 3-D printing. Over the past several years, newly opened and planned STEAM facilities have received multimillion-dollar funding in cities from New York and Baltimore to Tallahassee, Florida, and Allen, Texas, all with the aim of boosting innovative thinking in young minds — and enriching the future workforce.

Former Amazon marketing professional ­Sonali Pai opened this Zaniac branch in June 2017 in an effort to expose children to the tech fields at an early age and to help close the gender gap in the industry. Almost two and a half years in, demand has skyrocketed — and the girl-boy ratio has balanced out. “We’ve been really fortunate, because parents see the value” in the space, Pai says. “It increases curiosity. It’s not just ‘Let’s play this app.’ It’s ‘Let’s go build an app.’ It’s inspiring kids to think creatively and always question why.”

In one of the brightly colored activity rooms, 8-year-old Alexa Jadach pulls up a computer program called Dance Party and demonstrates how she controls the colors and movements of its cat character. The catch: She coded the program all by herself. Yes, at age 8. “It only took a day,” she says. She flips to the back end to show a screen full…