Georgia Kid’s STEM Day at the Museum of Aviation

Kids STEM DAY

To help inspire the next generation of scientists and technology professionals, the Museum of Aviation in Warner Robins organized the Georgia Kids STEM Day on 8/16/2014. It was a pleasure to see the museum education team and volunteers across middle Georgia come together to help kids from 2nd to 5th grade experience the fun and excitement of science, technology, engineering, creativity, and math.

I had the opportunity to attend the event this past weekend as a volunteer. The event attracted over 100 students.  I think everyone had a fun time tinkering, building, and experimenting. In one workshop, students engineered model rockets from paper, straws, and tape. It was neat to see their excitement launching their rockets into the sky. In another room, students learned lessons about electronics using Snap Circuits. In yet another space, students had the opportunity to tinker with robotics using Cubelets.

Thanks to the Museum of Aviation team for putting this event together.  It was so much fun!  You can learn more about this story at 13WMAZ  and Macon.com.

Our SparkMacon MakerSpace community was excited to support the Georgia Kids STEM Day. As a newly formed community, this was our first community service event. We had a blast! Two of my friends from Mercer Engineering Research Center helped kids invent cool musical art and crafts using MakeyMakey.

Mentors

The PiBot was a big hit with the young makers at the event. We loaded the robot with an obstacle avoidance program and let the kids “bounce” the robot across the conference area. For the curious students, one of our team members helped the kids make basic code changes to the Arduino robot. We were surprised to find a few 5th graders who felt very comfortable with editing and uploading C code. (I wasn’t doing C at 10 years old!)

PiBot

To help the kids get into 3D modeling and computer programming, we introduced the kids to ScriptCraft, TinkerCad, and 123D Sculpt.  Minecraft is always a hit with kids. Kids were empowered to build anything they could imagine. To enhance the building process, the kids were introduced to a few JavaScript commands to help automate large building tasks. One command automates the process of building a rectangular space of blocks. To learn more about ScriptCraft and Minecraft in Education, check out our review here.

ScriptCraft

Some of the students who visited us especially enjoyed blowing things up with “TNT” blocks. With this in mind, I taught them a few variations on JavaScript commands that would enable them to automate the distribution of “TNT” in the space. I never imagined that blowing things up could help motivate kids to code.  I think they learned about chain reactions from the activity too.

The Museum of Aviation provides a wealth of STEM events to kids, home schooling communities, and teachers through the year. Make sure to check out their website to learn more about their events, lesson plans and teaching resources (http://www.moaeducation.com )  To our community from Brent Lanford, Robert Betzel, Stephen Finney, Tanya, and Melissa, Thanks for volunteering and helping to inspire the kids.

 

 

Museum of Aviation 1

C-130 at Sunrise

 

 

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