We’ve got witnesses. Children and LINC staff who were there tell the tale of explosions, bubbling concoctions and seeming magic that was the first year of LINC’s in-house S.T.E.A.M. team.

“LINC approaches summer with a go-get-’em attitude.” So goes the energy across before and after school programs with all of LINC’s school district partners and special Freedom Schools as hundreds of children saw their summer education spiced with exciting field trips and celebrations.

It might be a sullen child alone, head tucked down in the morning. Or an anxious child, lashing out at other children at the end of a school day. They can move hidden within the swirl of a busy classroom, and LINC is working with the Kansas City Health Department to help see to it that these children are seen, understood and comforted.

The modern highway cruiser delivered them, joyously together, like a sleek time machine into Bessie Mays’ farthest memories. Here they were, at the Carver National Monument in Diamond, Mo., and Mays was taken back to her Mississippi childhood. “What I went through, he went through.”

A full camp of advanced and beginning chess players finished the week with tournaments and awards Friday, culminating five days of priming young minds to build strategic skills — that, and just loving the game itself.