Orange County has a “Manufacturing Day” where they take 8th graders from the 3 schools to tour some local manufacturing facilities to see some STEM and career opportunities. This year they decided to add a couple of hours to get some more up close/hands on experiences like you might have at a conference vendor hall. One exhibitor had a VR goggle set for them to try, another a bottle filling machine, a third had a robot arm where they chose a box of candy and it picked it up and handed it to them. Groups rotated after 15-20 minutes.
I had 3 stations myself for the kids to spread out. The least “maker” of the station was rubberband cars where they experimented on how to get it to go the fastest/farthest. Another station was building a geodesic dome out of coffee stirrers & pipe cleaner pieces (you make rectangles and triangles – we eventually got 2 domes completed). The third station was paper circuits with coloring pages.
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