By Douglas McCulloch
Hometown Weekly Staff
The Sheehan School was abuzz with inventions and experiments as the Sheehan PTO hosted its annual Sheehan STEM Festival last Wednesday.
With 58 teams registered and 130 students participating, the night featured a variety of inventions, science experiments and creative projects created by Sheehan’s second through fifth grade classes.
From volcanoes to hovercrafts to Rube Goldberg machines, the annual festival was an opportunity for the students of the Sheehan School to show off their creativity and ingenuity.
For Sheehan PTO STEM Festival Chair Liz Campbell, the STEM Festival has always been an exciting time to see firsthand the creativity of the students of the Sheehan School. This year was no different.
“It’s a thrill seeing the experiments kids come up with are always amazing,” Campbell said. “I think the parents are equally impressed.”
This year, Campbell was especially impressed with the number of second graders that participated in the STEM Festival. She noted that many of the kids who participate in the STEM Festival do so every year, and with more second graders participating earlier, she hopes to see even more participants next year.
The projects on display at the STEM Festival represented a broad array of experiments and inventions from virtually every subject, from science to physics and history.
Gabe Greenwald, Kevin Chin, Zoe Chin, Michael Stoll and Jacob McKinney decided to create their own homemade maple syrup for their STEM Festival project. The team became inspired when they visited the Natick Organic Community Farm and learned about how maple syrup is made by hand.
The team researched every aspect of maple syrup creation, from the best ways to extract the syrup from trees, to proper mixing techniques, and brought their maple syrup to share at the festival.
Luke Barley and Cameron Tran created a miniature tornado as part of their STEM Festival project on tornadoes. The two were inspired to study tornadoes after completing a research project about the Midwest and Tornado Alley for another class.
Click here to see more photos from the Sheehan STEM Festival.
