Beverly Education Foundation hosts Mobile Ed STEAM event

The Beverly Education Foundation hosted the Mobile Ed STEAM event for over 200 students at the Montserrat School of Art in downtown Beverly on Saturday, November 11th. The successful event was a culmination of many meetings, outreach and planning and was funded by a generous grant from the Institution for Savings Bank specifically for this outreach event.

The Beverly Education Foundation, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is dedicated to funding supplemental educational programming in the Beverly Public Schools. This particular event brought hands on Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math (STEAM) to the downtown neighborhood. Students in this area bus to school and because of that, it is often difficult for those families to attend night time activities at the schools. Thus, this event was specifically designed to bring the STEAM educational units into the neighborhood. Another, similar STEAM event is being planned for spring 2018 in another neighborhood in Beverly.

Mobile Ed brought several different science based stations to share with the families. Included in the stations was what appeared to be a simple blower with various objects, but in fact was teaching Bernoulli’s principal. An example of Bernoulli's principle is the wing of an airplane; the shape of the wing causes air to travel for a longer period on top of the wing, causing air to travel faster, reducing the air pressure and creating lift, as compared to the distance traveled, the air speed and the air pressure experienced beneath the wing.

At the Mobile Ed Steam event, families experimented with various objects to see how each was affected by the air pressure and flow. The Roman Arch designated area allowed students and parents to learn about both friction and gravity by building an archway out of fabric blocks. There was a stationary to kinetic energy setup where attendees peddled on a specially designed bicycle. Lights on a tower lit up proportional to the amount of energy produced via the peddles. Perhaps the most popular stop in the rotation of STEAM activities was the OzBot. Student participants designed a path for a robot to follow. Children designed paths on a computerized Etch A Sketch device. Bot would follow the pathway designed including showing the color of the path. Children were able to program turns, speeds, and coloring into their respective pathways. Other stations included a music maker, a 3D printer, as well as a gears and structures creative building area. The Beverly Education Foundation would like to thank the Montserrat College of Art for donating the space for this exciting event; Elizabeth Ciampa for organizing the event, Todd Rotondo of Cafe Salerno for providing the culinary delights, the Institution for Savings Bank which funded the event through a generous grant award, as well as ALL the wonderful volunteers and participants. Please keep your eyes open for the announcement around the next event in this STEAM series!