This story originally appeared in Youth Science Canada’s 2024 Annual Report.

“If you’re training athletes, you train them for the Olympics, not just a local competition. To instill the dream, however, you have to start somewhere.” This philosophy drives Khurram Abbasi’s mission to expand STEM opportunities in rural Alberta. “Engineers solve problems and make the world a better place,” he says. “But what happens when young minds with the potential to become engineers never get the chance?”

As a software engineer with Alberta Health Services and President of the St. Paul & District STEAM Society, Khurram saw a clear challenge: rural Alberta lacked STEM educators, while cities like Edmonton and Calgary had an abundance. Rather than accept this gap, he decided to bridge it. His solution? Use Portage College’s old carpentry lab as a virtual classroom, connecting rural students with remote STEM instructors for just $20 an hour.

The impact was immediate. Younger students designed sustainable towns in Minecraft for Education, while older students tackled real-world problems – cleaning local lakes, creating AI-powered robots for inventory management, and developing a robot to sort library books using scanners. Many even earned drone pilot licenses, taking advantage of Alberta’s open fields.

By November 2022, Khurram was pitching an interdistrict STEM fair to local school boards. Despite limited resources, the schools embraced the idea, and the team spread awareness directly to students. Drawing on resources from YSC and nearby established regional fairs, they launched their first interdistrict STEM fair in April 2023, followed by 30 hands-on workshops covering coding, robotics, and 3D printing.

Momentum continued to grow. By October 2023, two more school boards had joined the initiative, expanding their reach to 17,000 students across the Lakeland region. For the 2024 fair, they reimagined the event as a STEM conference, featuring drone shows, tech companies, and speakers from Google Education and Shad Canada.

What started as a modest virtual program has become a thriving STEAM movement, proving that access, not talent, unlocks the next generation of innovators. From an initial cohort of 40 students to sending top projects to the CWSF, Khurram and his team have shown how passion and creativity can create transformative opportunities for rural youth.

“We knew that although we had to start small, we had to dream big,” Khurram says. Today, that dream is becoming reality, one young scientist at a time.