As a part of this year’s Atlanta Science Festival, I was able to help organize and set up the event with our STEMcomm team. Our event was planned to be for young minds and their families to be able to enjoy, with crafts ranging from paper airplane making to sand art, which was the table I helped to run.
It was interesting to see how the different people who stopped by at the sand table interacted with the activity, the educational aspects, and volunteers. Our group had originally decided to set up the tables with our individual posters depicting the science behind the activity at each table, as well as creating activity guides for attendees to carry around and keep track of which tables they had visited. While everyone received a copy of the guides, parents seemed more often to be the ones who carried them for their kids. Some encouraged their kids to ask about the poster and listen to the volunteer’s educational speeches, while others let their kids choose if they wanted to educational aspect or not. The children who didn’t have their parents encouraging them to ask about the activity largely seemed only to be interested in the craft they could participate in. While it makes sense that elementary aged children especially may not be as interested in the educational side that we had originally hoped, to see their interest still captured by our event was one that made all the work put into worth it.
