Kids' Tech University Outreach

PYREX volunteered at Kids' Tech University, an outreach program for K-12 students in the New River Valley area, on March 22, 2014. An estimated 400 children came to the event to learn about STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) programs, and what an interest in STEM courses could lead to. Many different activities took place to take complicated information and make it accessible to younger students. Besides our demonstration, which will be discussed below, there were a lot of really engaging exhibits for even an Engineering Senior at Virginia Tech. Studio STEM: Save the Seabirds, BAJA, NRV Master Gardeners, Microgravity, and Weather Balloning in the Atmosphere were only a few of the many exhibits in attendance. A lot of interesting games and demonstrations were used to bring advanced scientific information down to K-12 student levels. As an Aerospace Engineer the Weather Balloons and the Atmosphere booth stuck out to me. The booth used helium balloons to show how payloads must be scaled for weather balloons along with Cartesian divers to show the effects of fluid pressure changes. If you have an opportunity to help out or lead a panel at KTU, I would strongly suggest doing so.

At our booth, we had three different activities to demonstrate our rover. The "high-tech" portion of our exhibit talked about the mechanical side of the rover. The Rocker-Bogie suspension system was shown and compared with skid-steering. Having the actual framework to show the rovers along side lego demonstrations of both suspensions allows children to observe the mechanics. The next part of our demonstration was a little game we came up with to show the claw mechanism collecting the "rocks", which in our case were washers with fasteners attached to easily pick up the washers. In one minute children had to collect and deposit as many "rocks" as possible without overloading the system with commands. What was great about having children play with our system, was that we could debug common errors that they may have experienced. (Win-Win in our opinion)

The last station was a very simple game to show how our system must interact. By breaking the children into groups of three, they had to take on the role of a rover system. Taped out was "TEXAS", our made up rock yard where our rovers had to collect "rocks", which in this case were large plastic bowls. Outside of the taped area was "Virginia", our home and control center. Since our rover has to communicate between Texas and Virginia, the rover and command input/output were blindfolded. The third team member was the human input or controller and had to interact with the command input/output to convey the commands, both in Virginia. The children with blindfolds were able to speak, whereas the third team member could see the field, but was unable to speak. The controller had to give commands in a way that the "electronics/program" could understand to be able to communicate with the rover. The "rover" had to listen to commands and try and collect as many rocks as possible. The controller sometimes had to act fast due to some communication issues/ bugs. If you think this sounds funny to begin with, it was even funnier to watch. Students came in thinking this would be a piece of cake, but later found out it was very frustrating to work as a concise unit to complete a simple task of picking up a few plates.

Overall the students were quite happy with the booth. They had a lot of fun with hands on activities and being able to run around and play. A lot of parents were quite interested in our booth and were really impressed by how we were able to appease students from Kindergarten to 12th grade. Even some parents enjoyed the games and demonstrations we had.