Such a delight to offer a few tables with different demos at Louisa Boren STEM K-8!


Such a delight to offer a few tables with different demos at Louisa Boren STEM K-8!
Oh, what a SPLENDID time we had bowling, and playing pool, table tennis and foosball! It was fun to have STEM Pals and UW MEM-C folks network during this first ever joint social event. Thank you to the ~20 who showed upn
We thank the Department of Physics at the University of Washington for sponsoring demo materials for our event at Echo Lake Elementary!
We had an amazing time running our booths at Westgate Elementary’s Science Night!
We had a blast hosting Wind Energy and Oil Spills & Wildlife booths at Women in Chemical Engineering’s (WChE) 7th annual Introduce a Girl to Green Technology event! Kids made their own pinwheels as we introduced them to renewable energy, and also learned about how oil spills affect wildlife with a fascinating water, oil, and soap demonstration.
We kicked off our collaboration for broader community engagement with the Pacific Science Center by securing a speaker – our very own Maleen Kidiwela – for a talk and Q&A about volcanoes during their IMAX showing of the documentary Fire of Love: https://pacificsciencecenter.org/igniter-science-movie/
We had a blast decorating cookies for our last social of 2022!
We had an amazing time growing microorganism cultures on agar plates at Hazen High School. In pairs, we chose hypotheses and tested them out. We let the plates culture over the weekend, and caught up over a Zoom call the next week. We uploaded our results, along with our hypotheses and observations, to an online platform. Then we voted on peers’ work for extra credit. The top-3 hypotheses from each period were:
Period 2:
– “We predicted that the men’s bathroom would have more microbes and bacteria than the women’s bathroom”
– “Our hypothesis was Shoe number #1 would grow more bacteria than shoe #2 because they were worn more.”
– “The Janitors cart is more dirty than the main hallway floor.”
Period 3:
– “I predict that the main staircase will have more microbes because it is used more often.”
– “We tested how effective water really is. We predicted that the unwashed hand would have more microbes than the washed hands.”
– “The eyewash station that is located in the front will grow less bacteria because it is used more often”
We partnered with the UW Reality Lab to conduct a 3 hour workshop at Hazen High School. It was really cool, and students had a lot of fun playing with Augmented/Virtual Reality headsets and doing some basic WebXR coding for them… FROM SCRATCH! Many thanks to UW Reality Lab and folks at Hazen for making this possible.
Following our virtual general information session earlier in the week (for the 20+ prospective members we gathered via mailing lists and tabling at the Red Square), we kicked the new academic year off with a fun afternoon outside the Physics and Astronomy Building! Many thanks to all who showed up (including new prospective members!), and to UW MEM-C for sponsoring chips and delicious cupcakes! WE HAD TWO FURRY FRIENDS JOIN US AND WE SAMPLED THEIR PAWS FOR MICROORGANISMS THAT WE CULTURED IN AGAR PLATES TO TEST MATERIAL FOR AN UPCOMING WORKSHOP. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA