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player ready...From flight simulators to robots to shooting balls into the air to swinging cups of water over their heads, about 200 kids got to experience science, technology, engineering and math in action Monday.
Members of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Northwest Indiana gathered at Urschel Pavilion and Central Park Plaza in downtown Valparaiso for fun activities.
“I felt like I was on top of the world,” said Leonard, 17, who posed for photos at the Best Buy booth. “She’s actually a really good picture-taker.”
Leonard does play-along videos on YouTube, he said. “I made a one-hour video six months ago.”
Lincoln, 12, used a handheld magnification device, adjusting the magnification to get images in focus.
“You have to zoom in the perfect amount to get it to resolve,” he said.
Austin, 7, used leather gloves to experience what astronauts deal with.
“When I had the gloves on, the screw, it felt like what people do in space,” he said. “The gloves are super big and my hand is small,” he said.
Jean-Michel Sicaud, a Boeing employee helping the kids, delighted in seeing the kids experience what astronauts deal with as they try to manipulate objects while wearing space suits. That included pushing pipe cleaners through tiny holes in colanders and threading nuts onto bolts.
“We already saw a few kids who want to be astronauts,” he said.
Austin wasn’t one of them.
Laylah, 10, played with Air Toobz, which uses a small air compressor to blow balls through plastic tubes the kids connected. The adult volunteers played fetch while the balls shot out of the ends of the tubes.
“I would tell my mom to buy these,” Laylah said.
Leniyah, 11, agreed. “I liked the way it shoots in the air,” she said. Leniyah liked cranking up the machine, increasing the pounds per square inch, to whatever level she liked, adding more oomph to the air pushing the ball through the tubes.
The Bernoulli principle of the ball floating on air is the same phenomenon used in various industries, including air hockey tables and hovercrafts. It’s also used in wind tunnels to test the aerodynamics of various objects.
Marcus Steele, family and youth service coordinator for the city of Gary, is a former Boys & Girls Club Youth of the Year who placed in the top three at the state competition.
“I was a club kid myself for five years,” he said, before going on staff for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Northwest Indiana and then working for the city beginning in March.
The annual STEM-a-Thon exposes kids to science in “a nice, relaxing setting that doesn’t feel like school,” Steele said.
“It just seems like it gets bigger and bigger every year,” he said.
“Getting all the clubs together, that’s what makes this experience so unique,” President and CEO Mike Jessen said.
Each of the eight clubs in Lake and Porter counties sent a team of kids.
“It allows the entire Boys & Girls Club family of clubs to get together,” Jessen said. “The more we do that, the better.”
During summer, kids can be at the club for as long as 11.5 hours per day so their parents can work. “All the clubs throughout the summer are going to multiple, multiple field trips,” he said, including the zoo, museums and other kid-friendly venues.
Jessen enjoyed playing Jenga with a small group of boys, watching them add blocks until the tower tumbled.
Jake Klotz, “a manager, assistant brewer, Swiss Army knife, whatever you need” at Blockhead Beerworks nearby, was a member of the old Valparaiso Boys & Girls Club, now the home to the recently opened Grand Gardner Hotel.
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“I got to see it transform,” he said, as the hotel was under construction. Recently, Klotz toured the building, picturing the old club as he went past where a bar now stands, and other hotel facilities are in use.
Denise Koebcke, now director of philanthropy for the Boys & Girls Club organization serving Lake, Porter, Newton and Jasper counties, was Klotz’s teacher. “Now she’s like the head philanthropist of Northwest Indiana,” Klotz said.
His job was feeding the kids lunch. “I’ve got people running hot dogs back and forth,” he said.
Karla Conrad, with the PALS young professionals group, taught the kids about centrifugal force, putting a glass of water on a cardboard platform with ropes attached so the kids could swing them over their heads.
“The object is to not spill the water and get things spinning in a circular motion,” like satellites, planets and other objects.
One brave group tried putting eight cups of water on a single piece of cardboard, she said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.