Impact Spotlight: Expo Center STEM Programming

When David Armenta was a senior at Manual Arts Senior High, he’d leave school every day after lunch and head across the street to the Expo Center, where he was a volunteer—and later a staff member—with the after-school program. “I was so advanced on my classes that my senior year, I think I had one or two classes,” he explains.

It’s only in retrospect, he says, that he wishes he’d been introduced to more educational opportunities during that time.

“When I started working with the teens, I saw the mentors that they had, how they would talk to them,” he says. “I'm like, ‘I wish someone would have helped me out,’ because I had all this free time. During my last two years of high school, I could have gotten my AA, I could have gotten something in coding—but no one really guided me and told me that stuff.”

As the facility director, that’s what Armenta is now providing the students in the robotics and coding programs he runs at the Expo Center through a partnership with Angel City, Quicken Loans, and Mindera Technology.

The inception of the program came via a former teacher of Armenta’s from the USC MESA program named John Santos, an engineer who had worked with high-profile companies and organizations in the tech world, including NASA. As Santos neared retirement, he’d started making plans with Armenta for an Expo Center STEM program, which he would lead and support using his industry connections. 

But Santos passed away in March, 2022, just months before the two were aiming to start the program.

Armenta hesitated about continuing without him. “This guy was supposed to help me,” he says. “I took this stuff in high school, but I'm not a pro, you know? But he would always tell me, ‘you never know what you can do until you try.’ So I almost quit on the whole STEM thing—but then, like, a week or two later, I met Chris [Fajardo] and Erika [Sánchez],” Angel City’s VP of community impact and senior manager of community impact. The two were enthusiastic about the idea and encouraged Armenta to continue.

Armenta, who didn’t have a tech or engineering background—he studied child development at Cal State LA—scaled back Santos’s ambitious plans. “I was like, ‘let’s do something basic, and then we’ll build up.’” The day he met with Fajardo and Sanchez, he had the idea to use Lego Mindstorm, a now-discontinued line of educational kits that allowed users to build and program Lego robots.

With funding from QuickenLoans through Angel City’s 10% Sponsorship Model, the girls in the initial 6-week program built Lego robots that performed various actions—kicking a soccer ball, walking a dog—according to each student’s vision. “I was like, ‘all right, we had a good year,’” Armenta remembers. “I thought it was done. And Chris was like, ‘David, we love your program and we love you. We'll see you next year.’”

One thing Fajardo and Sanchez liked about Armenta was his ease in connecting with young people. A big part of his job, especially in the beginning, was helping his students believe in themselves. “It’s sad to say, but some of the girls were like, ‘we're not smart enough for this. We can't do this,’” he says. “And I'm like, ‘it’s Legos! You go like this, you connect this, you follow the tutorial.’”

Despite his outward confidence, though, Armenta was having similar doubts about his own abilities. “I was super nervous, but I didn't show it,” he remembers. “Deep inside I was like, ‘what am I doing? What if this fails? Am I going to let the girls down?’ I'm telling them that they’re the smartest girls in this community, but I'm doubting myself as I'm doing it.”

But as the group started to have success, he got more confident in himself.

“I think after that first class, I was like, ‘cool, the girls got here, the mentors loved them,’” he says. “The girls had a good time. And they showed up the next week. For me, that was a win. So every week felt like a victory.”

Armenta has led STEM programming every year since, expanding his own knowledge base alongside that of his students. Past projects have included Angel City-themed social media filters geotagged to BMO Stadium and an LED propeller students programmed to display the ACFC crest and other images. At the most recent camp, which took place August 5–9, participants built and programmed their own drones with sponsorship from Mindera and in-person support from their staff, including US Code Academy Director Robert Martin.

For Armenta, one of the biggest highlights of this work was when the students presented their work at fan fest before an Angel City game in 2022. “For them, they were like, ‘why would people care about this Lego thing? Like, it's not a big deal. No one cares that we did this’ That's what they were thinking in their head.”

Of course, people did care, which the girls got to find out firsthand. “They had all those people from different communities come in and tell them, ‘you're amazing. You're awesome. You ladies did such a good job,’” he says. “That was a big turning point for them, because they were like, ‘oh, this does matter. No one's ever told us this type of stuff before.’”

“I noticed a big change in them from fan fest to the culmination [ceremony],” he continues. “At first, with the culmination, they didn’t want their parents there. Then after fan fest, they were like ‘can I bring my mom and dad and my cousin?’ That was pretty cool.”