Our friends at PARI reached out to us yesterday with a fantastic opportunity for community STEM educators throughout North Carolina. If you are a school, library, community center, museum, or other education center looking for a great STEM education partnership, this is something you should pay attention to. Please read below for more information and reach out to PARI with any questions that you may have.
If you’re a student or teacher who would desperately love to be part of an opportunity like this, contact your school or the education center that you think is most likely to host an event like this and spread the word.
PARI does cool science, people. There’s no question about it.
The website link below pretty much says it all. When PARI got its first 3D printer over a decade ago, their educators set out to find a way to combine it with space science. With some practice, experimentation, and some help from friends, 3D Planets began a few years later in 2015.
3D printers are still a big thing and they’re excited to offer the next round of 3D Planets programs and camps…so, how about this for cool science??
The 3D Planets Workshop teaches about Planetary Geography, Three Dimensional Spatial Thinking, and 3D Modeling and Printing. This means they talk about what the surface of other planets and moons are like, they try to help kids think in multiple dimensions rather than only what can be seen on a flat surface, and they use 3D modeling and printing to make animations of actual data, which often can be transformed in to real creations. After the brainstorming and out-of-the-box science thinking, we all believe it’s really important to take students one step further. How do students learn to share scientific results with the world? Not everyone absorbs information the same way, so learning to share science data with the world is a very important skill for scientists and science communicators.
If you’re interested in learning how a workshop is scheduled and set up, please click over to the PARI website and read through the information. There is no cost to a host organization to host a 3D Planets workshop as long as it is conducted according to PARI’s guidelines. And there are no costs to kids who attend the workshop, but they must commit to attending the entire workshop.
After reviewing the information on PARI’s site, if you have additional questions, please reach out to Laura Galloway (lgalloway@pari.edu) to guide you through the process of partnering with PARI on this incredible STEM workshop.
And, as always, you can reach out to us at the NC Science Trail (info@ncsciencetrail.org) for additional information about our partnerships, calendar items, and upcoming events.
