About EXCITE

Our Mission

To enrich young minds in a safe, fun, and supportive environment that fosters exploration of challenging educational experiences while having the opportunity to build on life skills and explore their intellectual and leadership abilities.

Our Vision

Create more engineers by promoting STEM and providing exposure to and excitement of potential career fields through outreach, education, and hands-on experiences.

Who We Are

EXCITE is run through the SPARC Lab at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Through this center, we have created several successful FREE STEM programs designed to help teachers incorporate fun STEM challenges and activities into their classrooms.

EXCITE is a project that is designed for early high schoolers; however, if you don’t have high schoolers, no worries! We have expanded our programs so that now we have projects available for any grade (K-12). To find a full list of SPARC Lab projects and links to their websites, check out the Partners tab.

While all of our programs are strategically designed for various age ranges, three aspects stay consistent between them: 

  • Our mission and vision is to excite and engage students in STEM 
  • Projects are FREE for teachers to use
  • Actual human project team devoted to helping you through the project and answering your questions

We have several full-time staff devoted to these projects. Please feel free to call or email us at any time. Contact information is listed at the bottom of each page on all of our project websites.   

EXCITE is primarily funded by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). We are very grateful to our sponsors for their continued funding of these programs so that we can engage and excite more and more students about STEM.

Our Team

Hannah Edmonson

Hannah Edmonson

EXCITE Chief Engineer

Abigail Williamson

Abigail Williamson

EXCITE Engineer

[email protected]

205.902.5681

Katherine Klepper

Katherine Klepper

Curriculum Coordinator

[email protected]

256.824.7634

Kristin Brevik

Kristin Brevik

STEM Education Director

[email protected]

701.899.1073

Matthew W. Turner, Ph.D.

Matthew W. Turner, Ph.D.

IDEAS Lab Associate Manager

[email protected]

256.824.4629

Michael P.J. Benfield, Ph.D.

Michael P.J. Benfield, Ph.D.

IDEAS Lab Manager

[email protected]

256.824.2976

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