Grade School

Our booth will contain a hands on engineering activity designed around the NGSS practices. Students and parents will design and build brides together. We are focusing on the engineering design process to have students, parents and community members to ask, explore, model, evaluate and explain.

Students will showcase PBL activities along with interactive, hands-on engineering challenges.

showing student work from across the district

This year we would like to have 3 different projects to present to the students. 1. Organ matching board: This is a fun activity for younger kids (elementary) to try to match the cartoon organs to the appropriate function and associated disease. 2. Either a Makey Makey board or a Mindflex duel game: A Makey Makey Board (http://makeymakey.com/) is essentially a simple circuit board that can be used as a controller with your computer, which we will use to teach the kids (elementary-middle) about circuitry (grounding, completing the circuit, etc).

Life Science - Exact activity and theme TBD

We will hand out information about our school as well as have a hands-on activity for the students to complete.

Make your own colorful lava lamps to take home. The test tubes from Steve Spangler Science can be used to do 15 more experiments at home.

The mission of the Bioinformatics booth is to introduce prospective students and parents to an emerging interdisciplinary field that is focused on handling large datasets and computational problem solving, in order to address complex biological problems. Such outreach is valuable to the scientific community as a whole, because it advertises the accomplishments in the field, and the dedication of the scientists and engineers involved.

Demos planned for this year’s festivities include DNA Extrac, Snap Circuits, Diaper Polymers, Silly Putty and Oobleck. All demos at the booth will be hands-on and are designed to maximize interaction with attendees. Through these activities we hope to engage with the children while introducing key science and engineering fundamentals. DNA Extrac allows attendees to extract DNA from strawberries.