Utah STEM Fest huge success with Utah County students
Payson Junior High students Taysom Haws and Alex Phillips work with classmates during a challenge in the InfiniD Learning Space Ship Simulator at Utah STEM Fest on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016 at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy. SPENSER HEAPS, Daily Herald
Payson Junior High students Brandon Roos, James Rowley and Gideon Argyle man a computer station in the InfiniD Learning Space Ship Simulator at Utah STEM Fest on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016 at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy. SPENSER HEAPS, Daily Herald
Payson Junior High students Taysom Haws, Kahmren Johnson, Alex Phillips and Patricia Nolan celebrate their team's success in the InfiniD Learning Space Ship Simulator at Utah STEM Fest on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016 at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy. SPENSER HEAPS, Daily Herald
Kids drive robots at Utah STEM Fest on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016 at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy. SPENSER HEAPS, Daily Herald
Kids use air cannons to try and shoot styrofoam cups of their friends' heads at Utah STEM Fest on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016 at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy. SPENSER HEAPS, Daily Herald
Where else in Utah can you drive a remote control BB-8, take a turn on a mini-excavator tractor, or extract your own DNA, all in one place? Only at the Utah STEM Fest.
Students from schools all over the state bussed their way to the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week to unleash their curiosity, and none were disappointed. With robots, drones, air guns, video games, a full-size block wall building area, tractor driving simulations and more, there was something for any kid, big or small. In fact, many of the adults manning the exhibits were a bit jealous. Nick Bybee, a co-op engineer at L-3 Communications, had one of the more popular booths, but said he wished he could wander around as well.
“There are so many amazing things here, and we don’t get to see them,” he said.
L-3’s booth was a favorite of Payson Junior High ninth grader Tayson Haws on Thursday. Dressed head to toe in Star Wars costumes, Bybee and the rest of the L-3 crew taught students that the electro-magnetic “force” was with them. Tayson was fascinated by L-3’s drones and planes. In one area, students got a bird’s-eye view of the Expo Center through L-3’s drones, while in another, they were able to follow the tracking aspects of multiple drones in a real-life situation.
“There’s so much variety here, and so many subjects to study,” Tayson said looking around the festival.
Another Payson Junior High seventh grader, Abby Neal, loved working with other students to build five-foot pink Styrofoam “rock” wall castles. Even when the boys knocked it down, because, well, that was part of the experience. She also was fascinated with the robotics booths, because she simply loves all things science.
Teamwork was key for the Payson Junior High group, and they earned a small claim-to-fame through it later in the day. The students took on an InfiniD space ship simulation, climbing the stairs to what looked like, on the outside as, a large trailer. But on the inside was a whole new world of space exploration. Before they stepped in to command their ship, though, they were briefed by Skyler Carr, co-founder and “chief handraiser” of InfiniD Learning. He warned them, of the thousands of students that visited the simulator over the course of the three-day festival, only about 300 groups had survived their mission.
“We have the highest death rate of any booth here,” he quipped.
The Payson group proudly exited the trailer a few moments later “alive,” joining the ranks of those rare survivors.
Over in another booth, other students were taking on a much more microscopic task. Freedom Elementary sixth graders from Highland willingly scraped the insides of their cheeks, swished with salt water, and then spit into little vials attached to a lanyard. Exhibitors from Itineris Early College High School in West Jordan then added a bit of detergent to the vials, to break open the cell walls of the students’ DNA. Next was ethanol, added to puff up the sixth graders’ DNA. Freedom Elementary student Jared Peeples, was fascinated by the process, and he and his friends shook their vials to see the DNA float around.
“It’s not very often you get to carry your own DNA around your neck in a little bottle,” said Lisa Smith, the Freedom student’s substitute teacher. (“Best sub assignment ever!” she said.)
Just across the way, Tyler Petersen, a driver mentor for Staker Parson, challenged the students who visited his booth with a real-world currently unsolved problem. With small rubber “rocks” and pebbles” he demonstrated a problem all gravel pits face.
“Engineers have figured out the best asphalt mix for making a road. It has to have these smaller pieces — the yellow and green ones, and these bigger pieces — the red and white ones. So here, in this bucket, that mix is perfect, and everything is in the right proportions. But watch what happens as we load that mix onto our conveyor belt to move it,” Petersen said, as he dumped the bucket into a miniaturized conveyor belt station.
When the different sizes of pebbles hit the conveyor belt, the larger red and white pieces stayed along the sides of the belt, due to their weight and friction. The smaller yellow and green pieces were taken quickly along the conveyor belt to the pile. Once everything had fallen to the pile, he asked the students to observe the mix.
“What’s happened to the mixture? Yep, all the larger rocks are around the outside,” he said. “Where are the smaller pieces?”
Swiping his hand through the pile, he showed students that all the finer pieces had combined in the middle of the pile. But if workers used the pile as it was, to lay asphalt, the mixture is totally off spec, and the road would be weakened, he said. So diggers now have to manually dig from different spots in the pile, as they lay the road, to get the best ratio of mixture. He asked the students for a better way to move piles of rock without causing that separation issue.
“There are 9,000 gravel pits in the U.S. And if you invent a way to solve just that one problem, you’d be a millionaire,” Petersen said.
And really, that was the main point behind all of the hands-on experiences at the Utah STEM Fest — to get kids thinking and excited about real-world problems and possibilities. To spark “children’s imaginations and give them a peek into their future career opportunities right here in Utah,” as organizers said on the STEM Fest website.
And the future is bright indeed. The next generation of workers will play with everything from 3D printers to nitrogen bubbles, from rockets to asteroid-mining robots, and much more. Really, what’s not to like about that?