Last Friday (5/9) at Menlo School’s 5th annual Maker Faire, teenage makers demonstrated the science inventions and innovative projects they’d worked on this year in classes such as Engineering, Robotics and Applied Science Research, including a singing Tesla coil, robots that wrestle, a self-parking car, and a solar-powered bike.
In each of these courses, students learn the usual science skills and topics — and then use them by applying them to real projects. For example, Applied Science Research students learn about the ideal gas law, and then use it to calculate atmospheric pressure and magnetic fields as they build and launch a weather balloon carrying sensors, analyzing the data they’ve collected.
Menlo is a MENTOR Makerspace pilot school, and many of these projects were built in Menlo’s Whitaker Lab, the…
