Orlando STEAM Innovation Programme

International schools need international experiences that matter. In late July, eight of our standout Oxfordians boarded a flight to Orlando, Florida with Mr. Guzman, Vice Principal at Las Quintas Campus, for a week inside an internationally renowned innovation programme.

The delegation was hand-selected, the criteria were top-tier English proficiency and demonstrated STEAM ability, assessed across the school year rather than in a single test. What they earned was a week of direct instruction from people who build things the rest of us only see finished: NASA scientists, Marvel animators, Disney Imagineers, and pioneers from the technology industry.

The workshops were hands-on from the first morning. Students coded AI bots, designed spacesuits against real engineering constraints, and worked through urban planning problems where every solution created a new trade-off somewhere else. Each strand fed into a final project: identify a real-world problem, then solve it through innovation and defend the result.

Between sessions came the access that makes a programme like this stay with a student for years, behind-the-scenes at the Kennedy Space Center, Universal Studios, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios, seen from the side of the rope where the engineering is explained rather than hidden.

Our delegation carried the Mexican flag through the week and represented Reynosa with the confidence we hope every Oxfordian graduate leaves with. Congratulations to all eight students, to their families, and to Mr. Guzman for building and leading the programme.