For North Atlanta science class fanatics, any conference featuring physics, biology, and robotics is a must-attend. The few dozen who actually did embark on the drive down to the annual Georgia Tech STEAM festival left feeling nothing short of amazed. This year’s festival, held on March 7th, brought together hundreds of students from across metro Atlanta, and each and every one of them discovered something uniquely fascinating to them.
The festival is designed by its organizers to promote science education and to get high schoolers to consider science degrees for their collegiate studies, with the intent of broadening their perspectives. If the group of Dub event-goers are any judge, then it’s clear that the objectives behind the festival are being met. Over sixty different exhibits are scattered across the Tech campus, with visitors able to explore and discover from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Students saw real human brains, impossible physics simulations, computer-controlled robots, and so much more.
Sophomore Beatrice Reichert went to the festival expecting to see a couple of cool things before she went home, but as the hours ticked by, she realized she didn’t even want to leave. Reichert, interested in pursuing a path in medicine, sought out many biology-rooted exhibits, like the chemical reaction of lamb liver in vinegar. She also saw printers from the nineteenth century and climate change simulations, but her favorite experience had to be getting her height measured in nanometers. “For some reason I didn’t expect for them to be so small,” Reichert said. “Apparently I’m 1,600,200,000 nanometers.”
Some students leaned a little more into the “magic” experiments—that is, experiments that felt impossible or like a trick. Piper Redmond, tenth grader, was awed by an exhibit involving glass and optical illusions. A small picture appeared on a metal sheet when a light shone at a specific angle, and she spent at least ten minutes trying to figure out how it worked. “One minute it was there, and the next, it vanished,” Redmond said. “They let me wiggle the light which was cool.”
Whether with practical experiments or experiments that felt unreal, the North Atlanta Dubs who attended the festival all found something that appealed to them and their interests. Some went with the desire to learn more about their future careers, while others drifted from exhibit to exhibit with only their curiosity and fascination to guide them. No matter what, one thing’s for sure: Georgia Tech will be seeing a LOT of returnees next year.
