Day 2: Tech’s Beginnings and Land’s End
The following is of personal opinion and skewed perspective. Read at your own discretion, and (hopefully) enjoy this one writer’s portrayal of a day as a Redefining Stem ASB participant.
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Jolted awake at 7 AM by the increasingly clamorous chimes of my phone (a lacking pseudo-alarm-clock), I walked across the room and around Jenny, who lay asleep on the ground. The morning routine continued itself without disruption: shower, breakfast, into the car, and the day’s adventure begun.
Our first stop was the Tech Museum, where we split into two groups and volunteered in the Cyber Security and Social Robots exhibits. The Tech Museum volunteer coordinator, Talence, welcomed us and spoke to us briefly about the contributions and purpose of the Tech Museum to expand science education and instill the curiosity for it for all students.
“We offer free field trips to Title I schools, which are schools that qualify to receive free or reduced lunch,” he mentioned. I was surprised that the Tech had offered such opportunities since I had come from a qualifying school and had never heard my science teachers discuss this possibility to us high schoolers. This isn’t meant to insult the Tech, since one reason why it wasn’t discussed at my high school may have been because the teachers didn’t know or they didn’t think we would enjoy a day there because we were just too old for it. Still, I wonder what could have happened if some of us were exposed to the quirky ingenuities of the Tech exhibits as freshmen.
Peggy added some insight by that same vein of thought when she asked what the Tech does to sustain that interest and curiosity in science. She continued: sure, you offer the free field trips, but what about transportation? What about the other factors that contribute to who has access to these opportunities?
Anyhow, perhaps that was too far of a tangent. The volunteering was, as described by my fellow ASB members, “innovative,” “accessible,” “fun,” “interesting,” “educational,” “childish,” “cute,” and “new.” We interacted with some children and family members, instructing them to the best of our ability (and often falling short because of our limited 30-minute introductory preparation), but mostly, we played with the exhibits, building our own social robots (who knows what makes them “social”?) and going through the activities in the Cyber Security exhibit, such as simulated missions into escapesque rooms (“Our company’s been hacked! Can you figure out why?”) and learning the basics of lock picking.
Some of the activities were quite challenging, demanding us to reread the instructions multiple times before we achieved a concrete understanding of the assignment. Jenny mentioned how it was a shame that since the activities accumulated on top of each other like levels, children who grew tired from one level weren’t motivated to reach the last few levels, which were the most rewarding.
After the Tech Museum, we drove to the home city of Jacky, AKA San Francisco. We headed first to Lands End and ran up the trail to take some group pictures and admire the widespread view of the ocean before us. It was a short moment of reprieve, but it felt awakening, with the wind sprawled across our faces and platinum skies above us.
Us trying to be cute.
The ensuing car ride to the Methodist Church (our shelter for tonight) was chaos-abound with precipitous hills (how rapidly the heart stops when the car creeps suddenly and steadily backwards and towards another car) and other proof of driving-in-SF notorieties: oblivious pedestrians, never-ending one-way only streets, confusing signs, pervasive construction sites that force awkward merges, and on and on and on. Even this horror (financially, emotionally) was absolvable by the dinner prospects because once we reached our destination, the thought of pot-hole infested roads and steep hills became just another awful memory. We focused on egg tarts, shrimp chips, seasoned seaweed, warm cookies, and spaghetti instead. Stimulating STEM discussions aside, the day’s brilliance was founded upon the interspersed philosophical discussions we had, the humorous interactions we shared, and the growing sense of community in this great ASB group. I blame it on the egg tarts.
