S.T.E.M – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – night took place on March 4 and was an opportunity for Science Honor Society members and tenth grade science students to gain experience by working with students from the elementary schools around the area. 

     Students were asked to design an interactive activity for their booth at the event. The activities were supposed to be hands on experiments to help the elementary school kids grasp scientific concepts. Junior Ted Rush made his booth about paper airplanes, which explained aerodynamics and the properties of thrust and drag.

     “We decided to tackle aerodynamics in the form of paper airplanes,” Rush said. “We used the basic concepts involved with projectiles – thrust, drag, lift and gravity – to explain how paper airplanes fly. We had kids, with those concepts in mind, to make paper airplanes. We also had five different examples of paper airplanes that kids could build themselves that took advantage of different concepts such as more thrust versus less lift and vice versa.”

     Becca Morris, junior and member of the Science Honor Society, had her stand centered around a hands-on activity where kids would build catapults out of popsicle sticks and spoons. “It was really fun to see the kids try and engineer the catapults themselves after we explained what the activity was to them. It was obvious that some of them listened to what  we taught and some didn’t.”

     The event also helped high school students understand their own material better. “Having to come up with experiments that were on an elementary school level but also dealt with scientific concepts was kind of hard, you had to really understand what you were talking about in order to dumb it down,” Morris said. “And having to explain it to them was sometimes hard too, because kids aren’t really going to know what inertia means.”