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Bay Area Students Explore STEM Fields During Campus Visit

The students participated in several hands-on, STEM-related activities designed to increase student engagement in STEM

In partnership with leaders at We Lead Ours, a local youth education and outreach organization, over 20 Bay Area students visited Stanford’s campus on October 12th. The aim of this visit was to give students from diverse backgrounds exposure to various aspects of science, technology, engineering, and math. The students participated in a handful of STEM activities. In one activity, they explored the effect of temperature on mechanical properties of polymers by observing the differing behaviors of Racquetballs and tennis balls frozen in liquid nitrogen. In another activity, the students explored the chemistry of acids and bases using purple cabbage juice, which acts a natural pH indicator and changes color based on the pH of the solution it is in. Finally, after learning how binary bits work in radio communication and the attempts human being has made to contact extraterrestrial intelligence, students created their own “messages” to be sent to the aliens by converting a two-dimensional visual “message" into a series of “0” and “1”s.