Clarkson hosts science, engineering festival for north country students

POTSDAM — Screams, shrieks and giggles were coming from a conference room in Clarkson University’s Cheel Campus Center on Wednesday afternoon.

“You knocked me off!” yelled Kaylee J. White, an eighth grader at Hermon-DeKalb Central School, as fifth-grader Tori J. Brunet used a foam pugil stick to push her off a foam block.

Ms. White, one of nearly 200 middle and high school students at Clarkson on Wednesday, was participating in the second annual North Country Science and Engineering Festival. The pugil stick station, designed to teach students how to calculate and utilize humans’ centers of mass, was just one of 26 science- and math-themed stations featured at the festival.

“It’s really fun. I’m tired now,” Kaylee said after battling Tori for several minutes. “We learned how to figure out the center of mass and how to do the calculations.”

Sponsored by the Impetus Program, a collaboration among St. Lawrence-Lewis County BOCES, the St. Lawrence County Math and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Partnership and Clarkson University, the event saw students from nine north country districts in attendance. According to Kathleen R. Fowler, an associate professor of math at Clarkson, the event was designed to motivate students to pursue STEM fields by showing them how much fun science and engineering could be.

“It’s really an enrichment program,” said Ms. Fowler “The motivation behind it is really to have a pipeline into math and science in college. … I think now there is a national need for a future workforce to solve problems we haven’t even imagined yet.”

The festival was organized with the help of 13 student organizations and nearly 60 student volunteers. Activities included firing a ping pong catapult, building a Wright glider model out of graham crackers and marshmallow fluff, collecting hockey pucks with remote-controlled robots and making “slime” out of Borax, glue and food coloring.

Other activities included building solar cars out of Legos, making aluminum foil boats, matching data sets for a model roller coaster and testing the strength of index-card structures. According to Randy K. Sanders, a physics teacher at Hermon-DeKalb, the festival offered a rare chance for younger students to meet college students and envision themselves as future students.

“The students are from small towns around here, and they don’t often get the opportunity to see what math and science is all about,” Mr. Sanders said. “I think they’ll have fun, and I think it’s a great opportunity. I’m glad Clarkson’s doing this.”