Fifth and sixth grade students from Durand Middle School in Durand, Michigan, and The School at Marygrove in Detroit recently took to the lifelike streets of Mcity.

Mcity, the University of Michigan’s 30-acre simulation urban mobility research facility, hosted the Pop-Up Safety Town Initiative—a hands-on traffic safety and STEM event designed for underserved communities confronting the persistent challenge of childhood injury.

This year marks the first time Mcity and Pop-Up Safety Town, co-founded as a U-M Concussion Center initiative by U-M physician Andrew Hashikawa, teamed up to bring middle schoolers from rural and urban districts to Mcity for two immersive days of traffic safety and engineering exploration.

“We have never collaborated with this age group, this middle school population,” said Hashikawa, clinical professor of pediatric emergency medicine. “So I think it is a unique opportunity on multiple fronts to leverage an amazing facility and bring together experts to teach kids about safety for a group we haven’t worked with in the past.

“(Mcity) is such an amazing facility. Where do you get real roads and walkways? It’s just a beautiful place to be able to do this.”

Hashikawa said that more than half of the middle school students from Durand and Detroit had never been to the U-M campus, despite being less than an hour away from Ann Arbor, and many of the students had never visited any college campus before.

“I want them to realize the potential and come to U-M, and say, ‘Wow, you know, this exists down the road,'” Hashikawa said.

Connecting STEM, safety and opportunity

At Mcity, students cycled through interactive stations designed to turn theory into practice and observation into understanding. Each child received a fitted helmet—an act underscoring both the science of injury prevention and the commitment to broader accessibility.

“When we looked at their surveys (from previous years), about 50% said that we don’t have helmets and we can’t afford them,” Hashikawa said. “When you are struggling with food and some of the basic necessities, a helmet doesn’t rise to the top.”

Providing free helmets and safety education ensures students leave prepared to make safer choices at home, he said.

U-M students led mini-lessons and hands-on activities, embodying STEM role models for the visiting fifth- and sixth-graders. Aidan Shoresh, K-12 outreach officer with U-M’s Tau Beta Pi, an engineering honor society, led the crash-test car-building exercise.

“It’s really important because with the prevalence of online education, it’s important to have hands-on experiences,” Shoresh said. “For students to get involved, I think it’s really cool that they get to see in person—using their hands and building something that they can actually touch.

“From the engineering side, I think it’s meaningful for us college students to be involved in education just to make sure we are able to convey our ideas—for the human aspect.”

Riding nonmotorized Razor scooters through Mcity’s realistic intersections, students practiced safe street crossing and helmet use. Medical student Dylan Hogan and U-M undergraduates Ava Rawley and Saketh Addanki played key roles in organizing and leading the scooter tour, incorporating safety lessons at multiple stops along the route. The event included interactive science and safety activities focused on bridge building and crash-car engineering.

“Hands on is a big deal. Being able to ride on the scooters with a helmet, that was awesome. Being able to construct the bridge with the materials given and that was all they could use, it was really neat to watch the kids work creatively,” said Angie Jewell, a teacher from Durand Middle School.

Laura Bollinger, also a Durand teacher, highlighted the importance of making mistakes in a safe setting.

“It’s safe to say I don’t have to worry about them having a vehicle involved or other agents involved that could cause detrimental consequences where if they can make these mistakes here and be like, OK, this could have been really bad if this were on a real roadway,” she said.

For many Detroit Marygrove students, the field trip was a unique opportunity.

“They would never have been able to do this anywhere else,” said Pier-La’Shaye Walker, a fifth grade teacher at Marygrove. “Being here gives them an opportunity to explore and ask questions.”

Connecting safety lessons

Durand Middle School principal Rebecca Shankster described the event as an important new experience for students.

“It has been an amazing experience watching them navigate the streets here. They have been able to take the scooters around through the city and learn how to safely navigate roads, intersections and crossings,” she said. “We are very grateful for this opportunity for our students, a lot of whom have never been on a college campus before. They wouldn’t have this type of opportunity otherwise.”

Jewell said the lessons learned at Mcity serve as a valuable reference for students, allowing her to connect their hands-on experience with classroom lessons in modern technology, for example.

Walker echoed the long-term inspiration of bringing kids to college campuses on field trips.

“This is their first opportunity and I would really like it if they did more of this. I remember when I was a child, when I was in fifth grade, that was my first experience on a college campus,” she said. “I belonged to a program that would come and visit our school and then we did the field trips to Wayne State. That really made me want to go to college.”

As students from both districts wrapped up their day—helmets in hand, safety skills improved and imaginations sparked—the Pop-Up Safety Town at Mcity demonstrated how educational innovation can bridge STEM, injury prevention and opportunity.

Hashikawa said the program teaches kids about injury prevention and safety science, giving them hands-on experience with safe behaviors and tools they can use at home and in their communities. The initiative highlights the power of partnership in building safer, brighter futures for children across Michigan and beyond, he said.