Day -18: First Learning Festival 🥳

Hellooo Spokes friends and fam! Today is May 18th and Spokes 2025 officially begins in…

I say “officially”, because while we haven’t yet hit the road, all the Spokies have already been hard at work. We’ve spent the fall, winter, and spring putting in all the behind the scenes hours needed to bring Spokes to life. Countless emails, a couple giant spreadsheets, and one popping WhatsApp community later… the finish (start?) line is in sight!

This past Wednesday, Charles, Joseph, Ishaq, and I got the chance to take two of our workshops for a test run at Carbone Hall, a juvenile detention facility and high school in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Charles and Joseph ran our Bottle Rocket learning festival, which teaches the basic engineering principles needed to make a large object defy gravity. At the end of the workshop, the students launch a rocket of their own by harnessing the chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar.

While liftoff wasn’t successful this time around, science and engineering are all about learning from our failures, right?

Speaking of which… instead of studying for my thermo final, I taught our thermo-inspired learning festival with Ishaq! Our Phases of Matter workshop walks students through the properties and molecular structure of solids and liquids, the (super cool) process of phase transition, and what happens when a material doesn’t follow the rules. In more exciting terms, we competed in an ice cube melting race, created molecules out of marshmallows, and, of course, made oobleck!

Luckily, Ishaq and I took our learning festival for a test run the night before because our food dye ratios were… well.. a bit generous. Luckily my blue hands didn’t scare away any of our students (or their teachers 😅). Lots to learn still!

On the topic of teachers, we’re so grateful for Carbone Hall principal Thomas Guarente, who made this learning festival possible. We’re also thankful for all our students for being awesome and engaged, Ms. Gabbie and Paul for giving us great feedback on the first iteration of our workshops, and all the staff who made us feel so welcome at Carbone Hall!

With our first learning festival under our belts and finals almost done, Spokes is really starting to feel real. I’m so excited to share our workshops with more students and to get some pavement under our tires. Stay tuned for a team intro post coming soon and a whole summer of adventures ahead!

Peace out! ✌️

Greta:)