Growing up, Belmont High School seniors Yassin Abdelazim and Omar Albarbari found a “spark” for science and engineering.
This year, the students finished their first summer of Belmont Makers, a nonprofit they founded to share their love for technology with the younger generation. As first-generation immigrants, Abdelazim and Albarbari said they both experimented with hobbies growing up. It took a while to find an outlet for their desire to build, design, and be creative. Their nonprofit, Belmont Makers, was created to help connect kids to a love of learning at a younger age.
“We really wanted to connect with the younger kids and give them a passion or that guidance that we were kind of lacking,” Abdelazim said.
The organization was officially registered as a nonprofit in late July. Since then, Abdelazim and Albarbari have hosted free workshops for elementary and middle school students on coding, 3D printing, and more.
“[The kids] loved it,” Albarbari said. “Their eyes were bright, and that’s all they could talk about.”
Belmont Makers has gone into local organizations like Champion Soccer School, and hopes to partner with programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the future.
Creating Belmont Makers meant long nights of planning lessons, stress from looming deadlines, and lots of rejection, they said.
“It was very eye-opening to see how collaboration works in real life when there’s stress and when there are actual deadlines that we have to meet,” Abdelazim said.
Both Abdelazim and Albarbari found a love for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) at a young age. Abdelazim learned about science from his father and said the time he spent with him embedded a passion for experimenting and building new things. Albarbari began playing on Scratch, a free program from MIT that allows kids to design games, animations, and more, when he was about 7.
Now entering their senior year of high school, both students are looking to pursue engineering degrees in college.
“We had a spark when we were little that gave us this love of STEM, that gave us a passion to pursue,” Albarbari said, “and it gave us purpose.”
