September 19th was USC Aiken science education and STEM day. This is a Fall tradition for 41 years at the University and has grown from 10 tables at the Ruth Patrick science Center to over 70 exhibits all over campus.
With the help of an Aiken high School volunteer, Logan, and 2 of my bootcamp students Jerrod and Brecken, I staffed the exhibit for CyberSC.us cybersecurity career and awareness programs.
Our booth used a really neat device called Makey Makey and a program called Apple Piano that allows you to connect apples as triggers for your keyboard demonstrating the difference between a conductor and an insulator, and how to complete a circuit.
We also gave out 150 CpherFidgets, the secret decoder ring designed and manufactured by my son at cipherfidget.com. New this year were my Enigma replicas. Imagine my surprise when an 8-year-old recognized them and demonstrated them to his parents.
We made over 80 presentations to almost 300 people during the 5-Hour event. While this is geared towards elementary and Middle School students, the parents seemed just as excited to learn about how your body and other items are conductors while wood and plastic are not.
The parents were also thrilled to see vintage computer parts and explain to their children how they used to have to save data on floppy disks and the computer screens only had words, but no pictures.
It was particularly rewarding to do the demo for one group of children and then another group would come up and they would demonstrate to the new kids what they had just learned.
