For All the Marbles

This weekend, dozens of NC State students and faculty from six colleges converged in downtown Raleigh to showcase their research and compete for a coveted grand prize. The judges also bestowed certificates to contestants for superlatives like “The Most Happiest Scientist” and “The Most Smartest Scientist.” 

It was all part of the Marbles Kids Museum’s first-ever Backwards Science Fair on April 12. The event was modeled like a typical grade school science fair, but it was the adults who were responsible for creating the projects — and the children, aged 2 through 10 years old, decided the winners. Teams from the College of Natural Resources, College of Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, Wilson College of Textiles, College of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences set up tables with demonstrations and hands-on activities. Each group had a beaker on its table, in which judges could insert Lego pieces to vote for their favorites.

Ultimately, a team of students from the Wilson College of Textiles and College of Sciences took home the grand prize for its smart clothing systems exhibit. The exhibit included a demonstration to show the science behind weaving cloth and how technology can be incorporated into fabric.

Honorable mentions included:

• RNA CodeBreakers: A team of microbiologists and biological scientists demonstrated how a codon wheel can decode amino acid sequences from RNA.
• Sound Out a Treat: A team of zoologists designed a listening activity involving cups and prizes, introduced children to a toy aye aye lemur and showed videos of real animals from their research.
• Grow the Next-Generation Strawberry: A team of horticulturalists helped children cultivate their own strawberry plants that they could take home.

Hundreds of people attended the event, which was a special initiative of the North Carolina Science Festival and was co-sponsored and co-organized by Marbles Kids Museum and NC State’s Office of University Interdisciplinary Programs. Jory Weintraub, director of science engagement at NC State, noted that the wide variety of research and the different backgrounds of presenters allowed children to visualize themselves as future scientists and engineers. At the same time, it was helpful for NC State’s student scientists to show and talk about their work with the public.

“NC State’s mission is to engage and serve the people of the entire state, and this was a great way to do that,” Weintraub said. “There’s so much amazing research that’s happening here, and our scientists and engineers aren’t always able to get out to the public and tell their stories. This partnership with the Marbles Kids Museum was a fantastic way to reach an audience that loves hands-on science and is super engaged and intellectually curious.”

Weintraub and Jonathan Frederick, CEO of Marbles Kids Museum, are already discussing plans to bring the event back next year.

“Scientists and engineers from all sorts of disciplines showed up with the best outreach activities I’ve seen in my career,” Frederick said. “From a ping-pong ball mousetrap nuclear reactor to a 3D printed wind tunnel to smart textiles to strawberry propagation and so much more, the children and families who participated were blown away, and I think the scientists were too. Saturday served as a great reminder that when you connect the public to real scientists in settings like Marbles, great things happen.”