HACK’D — Having Access Cultivates Kids Dreams — was the theme for Abraham Lincoln Middle School’s STEM event in honor of National Technology Day on Wednesday.
“We missed (celebrating it) for testing, so we pushed it to this week,” career and technology teacher and STEM Coordinator Arielle Mosley said.
She was the force behind organizing the school’s first big STEM event, which included all aspects of the discipline from math and science to engineering and technology. Last fall, Mosley also organized a similar career day event.
Sixteen vendors participated in the program, offering students hands-on science experiment stations, a mobile video game truck, TikTok lighted photo booths, a planetarium, a visit from a looming Transformer, a DJ, a hydraulics demonstration by members of the Fine Line Street Riders, the Robotics Club, sound and stage technology, representatives from Best Buy and others.
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It was a chance for students to have fun, and experience the impact of STEM on daily life.
“There’s not one thing out here that didn’t require math, technology, science, etc.” to create it, Mosley said. Participating vendors/demonstrations were based largely on projects students completed in her classroom throughout the school year.
“Whatever my kids made out of scrap products — like a cardboard car — I tried to get the real thing out here today,” she said.
Their lessons started with asking why they were doing a project or experiment, then how they could do it, and finally, “we did it,” Mosley explained.
At the BASF-run hands-on experiment station, Hermayia Washington and Carys Frantis tested how dye reacted when mixed with other elements, like water, vinegar or salt. Washington wore the painted cardboard Transformer suit she’d made in class. Farther down the table, X’Zyriah Oville was digging into a gooey bowl of shaving cream mixed with glue, colored dye and an accelerating agent, creating what would eventually become homemade fluffy slime.
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While some students avoided that experiment, Oville didn’t mind getting her hands dirty.
“Just wait, this is gonna be so cool,” she said, transforming the ingredients into a giant tacky slime ball.
Others took a more virtual hands-on approach playing basketball or MMA fight games inside the mobile video game booth, or went old school — dancing to the DJ’d music set up among the outdoor stations.
Whatever sparked their interest, the underlying lesson was that without STEM, those things wouldn’t exist. It was a day of fun that also brought their learning full circle.
“The kids understand it now – they get it,” Mosley said. “And judging by the reaction out here, they’re also really enjoying it.”