Last Saturday Vanessa and I ran down to the STEM Expo hosted by Ohio State University. We stayed until it got overwhelmingly busy, which is often too much for Vanessa. She seems to have an engineering mind so it was great to explore the different fields to get an idea of what she seems to enjoy most.
We started out by trying out the electric motorcycle built by Ohio State University's engineering students, which achieved
3rd place. When we looked at pictures of the riders, Vanessa decided that might be too intense for her.
Vanessa built an edible car and was extremely thoughtful when choosing components and persistent in adapting the parts for building it. She chose a carrot, small pretzel rods, fudge stripe cookies, gummy rings, and gummy bears to go along for the ride.She then tested it and it completed the course, although one wheel broke off at the finish line. She did awesome with no help from mom, except for encouragement to take her time to think through the steps.
She also learned about primary colors of light and said she enjoyed that most, before creating a hovercraft and trying one out. She also created clay boats to float and measured its sturdiness with pennies.
She used two catalogs with pages woven to pull up a greater than 200 hundred pound bucket of cement. Mind blowing.
We stopped by to say hi to Olivia from Bolivia. :-)
And Vanessa's predictions for environmental runoff were spot on.
