One of the things I like about my work is that everyone puts in great effort to make "Bring Your Kid to Work Day" a pretty fun and learning experience for the kids. This year was Emilia's first year that she was old enough to attend. Even so, the lessons were still beyond her comprehension, but nonetheless, a good start and exposure to the fun world of engineering. This was the first year I also got to tour around with Emilia and check out all the different presentations from the various labs and groups.
The first stop was with my group, in the electronics lab, which started with a brief introduction on what the group does with examples of different components and stages of a product test cycle.
Note the things on the table. Kids got to touch it and relate to it pretty much as the insides of a fancy computer.
The demonstration was focused on sound waves, showing how different tones/pitches of sound could be converted to an electrical frequency and quantified on an oscilloscope. Then kids got the chance to play around with using a mic and watching their voice conversions. Our group was pretty mellow.. but I heard the later groups, with the older kids, were just taking turns screaming and laughing into the mic.
Sound Waves
Next stop was a visit to the Optics Lab, where some engineers from the Fiber Optics team put on a demo and discussion about light spectrum and diffraction.
I thought this demo was pretty fun. They started off discussing the concept of light and how our eyes interpret what we see based on the light and the medium the light passes through. They also had different shaped prisms, convex, concave, etc and laser beams, where kids had to figure out which way the laser beam would bend base on the shape of the prism they were using.
They ended with an interactive experiment where the kids had to look above the water and try to "spear" a fish (aka a coin) at the bottom of the water tank. The idea was that the light through the medium of water distorts the perceived location of our fishing rod (aka stick) and the location of the fish.
Light Diffraction Through Water
Next up was the Physics Lab. Here a group that works on failure analysis of boards and materials gave a demonstration about a specific instrument that measures spectral density of objects. They had a few items of "white powder"... sugar, corn starch, salt, etc. .. and without touching or smelling, just by looking, the kids were to try to find the one that was sugar. Kids tried to guess, and the engineers would put the white powder on the instrument and measure the spectral density to determine what it was.
Throughout most of these demos, Emilia was the silent one... sometimes doodling on her notebook instead of paying attention.
To provide incentive, I said I would give her a piece of candy every time she asked or answered a question. Low and behold, her hand started going up!
Second half of the FA group's demo, was Bob talking about another instrument, a scanning electron microscope (SEM), that scans a focused electron beam over a board surface area to create an image of surface topography and composition which helps with board failure analysis and debug.
That's already quite a bit of demos.. but there are two more. Next one is still part of the FA/Mechanical group. Here the kids got a preview of a very specific instrument called the Romer Arm and basic idea of how it works. The instrument itself is pretty neat. Once coordinates are provided, you move a laser scanner of the arm over an object, and it translates the topographical image based on recorded distance away from initial calibrated position. You can do it again from a different angle, and the software can combine the various scans so one can have a dimensional image that can be rotated, flipped, etc.
And last of the engineering demos, was provided by the the Cryptography team about password safety and hacking algorithms. Kids got a chance to learn how to create harder to break passwords and then they had to create a password based on the concepts they learned from the demo, and then the Cryptography team was going to attempt to break it. If any passwords were left unbroken in 2 weeks, the kid would win a prize. We thought Emilia had a good chance.. she came up with an AWESOME password. But alas, she did not win.
Total of 5 different demos from various engineer groups. Pretty awesome for the engineers and teams to set aside some time to do this for the kids. Not only were there demos, there as also simply fun engineering experiments for the kids to witness.
Behold... the liquid nitrogen rolling out...
Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream
And concurrently, someone had a great idea to do an experiment of the liquid nitrogen smoke bomb. In fact, the engineers here spent the week prior refining the quantities of liquid nitrogen to scalding, hot water to create just the right about of explosion and smoke for a giant smoke bomb effect. It concluded the "Bring Your Kid To Work Day" with a giant bang! =)
Nitrogen Smoke Bomb
Where was Emilia in all of this kid chaos? She decided not to be one of the kids to run in and try to put their hands on liquid nitrogen with hot water.. instead she stayed by the ice cream table, patiently waiting for the perfect liquid nitrogen ice cream.
And she was rewarded with a yummy giant scoop! That's my girl!
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