The Drone Obstacle course is back by popular demand for the 2019 Mineral County STEM Festival, to be held Saturday, March 30, from noon to 4 p.m., on the WVU Potomac State College campus, in Keyser, W.Va. This event is free for students K through 12 and their families.
The seventh annual Mineral County STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Festival will be held at West Virginia University Potomac State College (PSC) on Saturday, March 30 from noon until 4 p.m. on the Keyser campus.
This free event is open to students K-12, their families and to other members of the surrounding communities. The STEM Festival will host an exciting variety of interactive presentations and demonstrations that are sure to entice the curiosity in everyone, and make participants aware of the many career opportunities available in STEM fields. Following is a brief summary of demonstrations being provided by Potomac State College.
Students from Instructor Viktor Frazier’s biology class will give presentations and demonstrations on The Body Systems, including: cardiovascular, renal, respiratory, and circulatory.
Heal a Wound will be presented by Diana Niland, FNP-C, who is a certified wound specialist; and Sue Wells. This interactive presentation will have make-up wounds created on participants, who will then learn how to care for and heal their wounds.
PSC Employees David Miller, multi media specialist, and Nick Gardner, library technician, will present Drone Obstacle Course! Stop by and Fly in the Library, an interactive demonstration that will allow participants to see how many targets they can fly through in two minutes with a drone.
Brown Cow Chow Down will also be presented by Miller, along with Stacey Huffman, WVU Agriculture Extension Agent. This interactive demonstration will have participants strapping on boots to feed the cows. Be amazed as Eugene the mechanical cow eats buckets and buckets of feed that turns into energy which makes him grow big and strong.
Biology Professor Gerald Wilcox will present a demonstration on Healthy Lungs and Simulated Smoker's Lungs. This activity will demonstrate the difference between healthy pig lungs and simulated smoker's lungs, which represent the lungs of a person who smoked a pack of cigarettes per day for about 20 years.
An Introduction to Modular Arithmetic, will be presented by Mathematics Professor Richard Petersen. Arithmetic is the study of the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Participants will explore these operations in a new set, denoted by Zn = {0,1,2,...,n-1}, where ‘n’ is a positive integer. We call this set the ‘integer’s mod n.’
Participants can also interact with Mechanical and Electrical Projects which were built by freshman and sophomore engineering students in Professor Mohammad Saifi’s engineering design class.
For more information about the STEM Festival, contact PSC Instructor Andrea Schafer at 304.788-7133 or agschafer@mail.wvu.edu; or 4-H/Family Extension Agent Margaret Miltenberger at 304-788-3621 or m.miltenberger@mail.wvu.edu.
There are numerous other activities and demonstrations to participate in at the STEM Festival, so get the kids off the couch, off their phones and computers, and spend the afternoon learning about the world in which we live.