Eight MIT and Harvard students are biking across the country to teach hands-on engineering workshops to students in select locations! They are stopping the Carson City Public Library!

Here are the workshops they will be teaching:

Build your own Speaker and Catapult: Physics in Action

In this workshop, you will learn the basics of medieval mechanics as well as electricity and magnetism. You’ll have an opportunity to build your own homemade speaker, motor, and/or catapult. After learning the basics of how these three pieces of technology work, there will be a competition for whoever’s catapult launches the farthest, (fabulous prizes included)! By working on these projects, you will gain the skills to conceptually understand and physically create your own physics experiments!

How Computers Work: Building Circuits

Ever wondered how a computer solves math problems? Or how it represents numbers and words in a bunch of 1s and 0s? In this workshop, you will learn about binary, the language of computers. We’ll talk about the basic building blocks of computers, transistors and logic gates, and see how these elements come together to form a computer. Then you’ll get to use those gates to build circuits on breadboards that can add numbers for you and maybe even do more!

Games, Games, and More Games: Math and Strategy

In this workshop, students will play various games and puzzles to explore mathematical concepts such as probability and combinatorics. Students will probe at questions of probability and combinatorics through play with tilings and colorings. Also, physical games will be used as tools for exploration, conjecture, and as a means to facilitate engagement of different age levels in the classroom. Concepts will includ pattern puzzles, building blocks, and the game SET as part of our workshop.

More than Meets the Eye: The Human Visual System

In this Sensational workshop, students will explore all five of their senses and learn about the complexity behind how the brain interprets sensory information! The first half of the workshop will be focused on many small but fun activities that will highlight the subconscious tendencies of our human brain included in the first half (but definitely not limited to!) are a neuron measuring experiment, optic nerve blind spot test, and a blindfolded trust game. Once the students have a better understanding of how our senses work, in the second half of the workshop we will take a deeper step and delve into a dissection of a Cow’s Eye Ball, where we will examine the anatomy of a sensory organ.

Seats and materials are limited, registration in advance on our website's calendar to reserve your spot