HILLSDALE—Kids of all ages joined Pascack Pi-oneers FIRST Robotics Team 1676 for its annual Fall for STEAM Fair on Saturday, Dec. 11.
Foot traffic was joyously heavy at the event, at Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale, where the team’s 90 members (from Hills and Valley) had collaborated to set up 30 interactive tables of science, technology, engineering, art, and math activities for special visitors — who had parents and grandparents in tow. Masks were required.
A demonstration on “elephant toothpaste,” promising a giant foaming reaction, fizzled at first. “That’s OK,” said the team’s student demonstrator. “We’ll just take a step back, check our work, and run it again.”
The fair, which promotes disciplines essential in critical thinking, innovation, and an increasingly competitive workforce, also collected nonperishable food donations for Helping Hand Food Pantry of Hillsdale and Tri-Boro Food Pantry of Park Ridge, “to help our neighbors experiencing food insecurity.”
According to the event’s students organizers — and students lead throughout the varsity
Pi-oneers team experience — the day is an annual tradition and a thrill leading up to the next year’s tournament, which kicks off in the first week in January.
At the fair, stations on science introduced the periodic table of the elements, static electricity, light as a rainbow, “magnet madness,” and “what we’re made of.”
Art presenters made friends through fingerprints, origami, pixel art, “STEAM and a story,” constellation creation, and a walking rainbow.
Math captivated through geometry games, secret codes, Mobius strips, the Tower of Hanoi, and probability.
Technology was popular, with a musical power station, an hour of code, snap circuits, line-following Ozobots, programs by Pi-oneers, and robot programming.
Young engineers in the making took on challenges to do with boat design, marshmallow-tower building, bridge building, straw and paper airplanes, “a-maze-ing” marbles, and a catapult.
Coach Lisa Ruggieri pointed out that everything the team does in orbit of its robotics tournament is to connect with children in the Pascack Valley, including through its FIRST Lego League for ages 4–16 and its FIRST Tech Challenge for ages 12–18.
In the FIRST Robotics competition, teams design, program, and build a robot starting with a standard parts kit and set of rules.
And outreach is part of the team’s DNA. Nonprofit FIRST says, “Teams build a brand, develop community partnerships for support, and work to promote STEM in their local community.”
Amid the bustle, including a 2017 world-champion robot lobbing toddler-safe balls in the air, and families richly doing and discovering, Eliza Krigsman, a Hills sophomore teammate in community outreach, told Pascack Press, “Everything here is interactive. We really tried to make it interesting for our audience, which is younger.”
She said, “When you join fun with education it tends to be a really good match. Nowadays school is maybe not as fun as students would like it to be, to be honest, but if you combine that, it’s a huge deal.”
She said, “Covid has definitely diminished schools’ interactivity, and it’s been tough for kids to get that aspect; they don’t have that hands-on learning. They just have their screen, through Zoom.”
A mom enjoying the conversation from nearby underscored that point: “She’s spot on!”
Krigsman added, “Especially with kids at this age, they’re losing crucial developmental skills — those social skills. for them to have that… that’s really important to develop.”
She said, “Even with me, on the robotics team, I use my hands all the time to build stuff, and contribute to my community and the team as a whole, and I think it’s really meaningful to have this.”
Krigsman said she joined the team’s mechanical subdivision as a freshman then “accidentally” joined the community outreach and international units as well, which she said was “the best mistake of my life.”
She said she found, in talking to teams in South Africa and Turkey, among others, what’s so exhilarating about scholarship and collaboration. “Those words you wrote, that thing you worked on, that thing you did: that’s going all the way across the world to those people, and it gets put to the test and it resonates. That’s indescribable.”
Taking in the fair, with its sea of children and islands of discovery, she said, “You get to work on things like this. It’s such an amazing feeling to able to impact these kids. Maybe one day they’ll pursue a career in STEAM.”
That mom who commented — Tina Guarriello of Park Ridge — later told Pascack Press that she was attending with her son Dominic, nearly 8. “I have elementary school children. There are no opportunities for hands-on learning anymore because of covid, and they have to sit apart and they have to have spacing and they can’t mix.”
But at the fair, she said, “There are all kinds of things here that I
didn’t know about. There are bots… Dominic is loving it; I think it’s great.”
Dominic agreed. He showed off his event’s stamped “passport,” proud of all the territory he’d covered thus far.
Before we left we met fair co-organizer Donald Lafferty, a PV senior from Hillsdale, and Nathan Lee, a Hills senior from Montvale, who designed the event’s graphics.
Lafferty said last year the fair was virtual. “This is better. It’s a lot of work getting all these people together, but it pays off.”
Lee agreed. “Given a platform for me to share all my favorite experiences, and the favorite experiences from all the Pi-oneers — it’s fantastic.”
For more information on Pascack Pi-oneers FIRST Robotics Team 1676, including sponsorships, visit team1676.com.