Published in the March 18, 2019 edition.

By SARAH ROEHRICH

WAKEFIELD — On Thursday, March 14 — Pi Day — the Wakefield Public Schools STEAM Community Task Force hosted STEAM Night for the second time at the Galvin Middle School.

STEAM Night is an opportunity for educators and professionals from science, technology, engineering, art and math to share their passion for STEAM through interactive demonstrations. The fair partners high school students with STEAM professionals to offer a variety of free, hands-on STEAM activities for Wakefield students and their families.

This year, organizers were extremely fortunate to have over 40 exhibitors for STEAM night, many of whom generously donated their time and resources to come provide activities.

Some of our exhibitors provided the following:

Amazon Robotics explained how their warehouse robot works, the Brain Matters outreach program from McLean Hospital provided real brains for kids to hold, and the Cambridge Science Festival provided materials to make and test flying, whirlygigs.

Friends of Lake Quannapowitt provided water testing, the storm water division from DPW taught kids about storm water, and Sustainable Wakefield taught kids about recycling. WCAT allowed kids to try their hand at podcasting, and the Greenwood Elementary School provided 3D, Google, virtual reality goggles to take kids on virtual reality field trips to see sharks in the ocean and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.

The Girl Scouts provided lemon power batteries and the Dolbeare Sparks program provided information on animal adaptations. iRobot, Roots Robotics, and Tufts Robotics Club showed how their robots work, Mr. Gorski and his team demonstrated what kids do at Science Olympiad, and Mr. Colantuoni and Mrs. Katianne Williams, the media specialist at the Galvin Middle School, showed off the most recent member of the Galvin Middle School, a moving, talking, humanoid NAO robot, generously funded by a Wakefield Education Foundation grant.

Thanks to Epsilon, our corporate sponsor, and a grant from the Wakefield Education Foundation, our educational sponsor, we were also able to sponsor 9 exhibitors this year, including Fox Forensics, CSI for kids, Lesley University STEAM Learning Lab featuring Scratch X, Mad Science of North Boston featuring chemistry experiments with dry ice, Museum of Science creating and testing flying things in air tubes, the New England Aquarium tidepool exhibits, Top Secret Science, Tufts Center for Engineering, Education, and Outreach Robotics Club, Wicked Cool for Kids, and Zoo New England animals, including ferrets and snakes. We are extremely grateful to those who made valuable monetary and raffle donations through our website, wpssteam.weebly.com, for our event. They were greatly appreciated! All of your donations put together allowed us to create an amazing raffle filled with STEAM-related activities for kids of all ages!

A huge thank you to Jennifer Thomas, the Science/Technology/Engineering Curriculum Coordinator for the Wakefield Public Schools, who chaired the WPS STEAM Community Task Force. Enormous thank you’s to all the exhibitors, students, teachers, administrators, parent volunteers, and everyone who came to STEAM night 2019! We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did! We would love your feedback too! Please fill out the comment card on our website, wpssteam.weebly.com, if you have not had a chance to do so. We would also love more community members to join the task force.

If you are interested, please sign up on our website at Join the Taskforce under Home. Or, come sign up at our STEAM table at Parent University on Saturday, March 23, 2019.

More photos will be coming soon, both to our steam website, wpssteam.weebly.com, and to our facebook page, Wakefield Explore STEAM Night 2019. Many of them were taken by high school photography students. Please check them out when you get a chance.