We will showcase different 3D printed projects such as a perpetual motion machine, sculptures, robot arms, etc.

Mix and match the robot puzzle parts! What kind of robot will you build?

Inspired by Vicky Fang’s inventive AlphaBot, an interactive STEAM book for young readers that teaches robotics terms, MIT Press Bookstore in conjunction with Candlewick Press invites you to play and learn at our robot puzzle party!

This is a hands-on craft suitable for kids ages 3-10 and their families.

Register now! The first 50 registrants get a free take-home build-a-book-bot craft kit.

Copies of AlphaBot will be available for purchase at the MIT Press Bookstore, located steps away from the Science Carnival at 314 Main Street, and online.

Come explore your fascinating immune system with hands-on activities for the whole family.

Stop by the Ankyra booth as we showcase how drugs can be anchored to disease sites to improve treatment and safety.

We are interested in building deep learning models for Brain imaging segmentations along with other phenotypes!

At our booth, you’ll have the chance to create art using engineering principles, including experimenting with an art-making robot that will help bring your creations to life!

Join the Peabody Essex Museum in exploring the superpowers of bats! Discover how designers and innovators are drawing inspiration from these amazing creatures, leading to new inventions and ways of understanding our world. Learn more about the museum’s current exhibition, Bats!, and create an art project that will put biomimicry into practice.

Bzzzzzz! Discover the science behind sounds as you engineer a device that creates air vibrations to mimic the noise a swarm of bees makes.

Join us for an engaging hands-on activity where you can design, build, and personalize your very own Bristle Bot – a small robot created from everyday materials such as toothbrush heads and mini motors. Learn more about robotics by building your bot and checking out our very own robot demo!

Building a tiny kite is almost as much fun as flying it while you walk. Stop by for a minute and build your own kite.

You will learn how to build and pilot your own walkalong glider. This technique allows sustained and controlled flight of a simple paper airplane. It will fly forever!

Learn to use a dropper like a chemist as you practice making colorful spheres like the ones at the bottom of the popular Taiwanese beverage, boba tea. Your special spheres, made from seaweed extract will be gel on the outside yet squirt when squished.

Biology happens at the nanoscale. At the Cambridge Science Festival Carnival, scientists and engineers from MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine will be on hand to show you how we design tumor-fighting tools inspired by MIT research. Join us for search-and-find to learn what it’s like to be a researcher helping treat cancer. We’ll also have 3D images to help you explore the microscopic world of e.coli bacteria.

Engage in a fun filled activity to discover the secrets of celestial slime. Prepare to be astounded as you learn about the science behind this secret slime making process. Discover how the incredible powers of glue, borax, and vibrant pigments combine to form an astonishing celestial slime, transforming simple ingredients into an astronomical creation. Kids will use their imagination to create their own out of this world slimes in this 15-minute adventure.

Change is Simple (CiS) and SCiLL – our Sustainability & Climate Innovation Learning Lab – bring hands-on STEM learning to elementary and middle school children in Massachusetts.

SCiLL is a 30-foot-long, mobile lab outfitted with cutting edge science and learning tools you’d expect to find in a professional laboratory setting. It offers lessons on important aspects of sustainability.

The circus is known for awe-inspiring, physics-defying acts that leave viewers with a sense of wonder. From thrilling knife juggling to soaring trapeze artists, the circus provides entertainment that balances reality with fantasy and leaves all in fascination.

But, what if I told you that most of these thrilling endeavors can be explained by science?

With Le Sally Discovery School’s interactive exhibit, come explore the science behind some circus favorites: plate spinning, tightrope walking, and illusion acts. At the end we will have you questioning the reliability of your own perception and possibility of real life levitation.

Using Hyperscore, you’ll compose an original piece of music in minutes. Once you get the hang of it, there’s no end to what you can create. Discover the singular power of music to communicate your story.

What planets orbit the stars that shine brightly in our night sky? Are they gargantuan or minuscule? Warm or chilly? Part of a family or on their own? Meet the astronomers studying these exciting planets with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS. Learn with hands-on activities about the TESS mission (in operation since 2018!) and how astronomers at MIT and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian use this tiny but mighty telescope to find weird and wonderful worlds called “exoplanets”.

Create a design for your ideal learning environment. Think about scale, amenities, atmosphere, sounds, signs, materials, and more! Bring yourself and your creativity and we’ll lead you through a quick design process.

Meet SeaPerch II, a DIY underwater robot than can also take data on water quality! Stop by the MIT Sea Grant booth for interactive demonstrations of the sensors and grippers, an illustration of the ways in which climate change is affecting the marine environment, and an underwater robotic challenge where you control the robots!

More information and build guides at seagrant.mit.edu/seaperch2

How do we observe the teeny tiny things that make up our world? With microscopes! Join us and our women scientist role models to observe the world on the small-scale with a set of foldable paper microscopes. Look at some cells with Rosalind Franklin, or check out a meteorite sample with Sally Ride! This booth is hosted by the Graduate Women in Science and Engineering organization at Boston University. This booth is perfect for families, but people of all ages will enjoy taking a closer look at our scientific samples.

Learn how the sun powers our world! In this activity, you’ll learn how sunlight gets transformed into energy that powers everything from our homes to our bikes!

EnchanTech – Where Magical phenomena are explained through scientific principles. We are a bridge between magical and scientific realms.

By applying scientific principles and technologies, we can decrypt the seemingly magical aspects of these concepts and understand how they can be achieved through scientific means. While they may not possess the same enchanting quality as magic, they demonstrate the ingenuity and creativity of using scientific knowledge to create magical experiences for kids.

Some products to check on our table:

– EnchanTech Potion: While magic ink may seem fantastical, there are scientific principles that can explain its seemingly magical properties. See and do it yourself to understand how ink can be “magically” revealed by using different PH value chemicals.

– EnchanTech street Lights (Hand wind): A magical light powered by hand winding can be understood through the principles of energy conversion. By incorporating a dynamo mechanism, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy, the rotational motion generated by winding the wheel can produce electricity. This electrical energy is then used to power the light-emitting diodes of street lights, providing the illusion of magic by turning the winding motion into a source of light.

– Light-up Cards & Light-up Wands: These utilize simple electronic circuits to create the illusion of magic. These circuits consist of a power source (such as a battery), conductive tapes/wires, and LEDs (light-emitting diodes). When the card is opened or pressure is applied to a certain area, the circuit completes, allowing electricity to flow and lighting up the LEDs. By strategically placing these components and designing creative card designs, the cards can appear magical when they illuminate upon activation.

– EnchanTech Coloring Robot: This is achieved through a combination of small motor & colors creating the illusion of a magically coloring robot.

A series of fun and educational hands-on activities involving synthetic biology, tissue engineering, biology, and biomedical engineering.

We will have several hands-on demos to explain concepts such as synthetic biology circuits, immunotherapy, and a vaccine cornhole game

We will have several small activities available for children, families, and adults. We have a giant brain to take apart and put back together, and anyone can race against the clock to see how fast they can go. We will help you build a neuron with pipe cleaners, and we will make “brain hats” for you to wear around the festival! Along the way, we’ll explain the brain, neurons, and their importance in learning.

Come explore the Sun with MIT Astrogazers! Our event will let you peek into a solar telescope and learn about sunspots, flares, and other solar phenomena up close and in detail. You will also have the opportunity to talk to astronomy experts about solar science and astronomy. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to witness the power and beauty of our nearest star!

Stop by to learn how wind turbines work! Build a mini turbine of your own and see how the wind is affected from one turbine to the next. Finally, design and develop a floater for an offshore wind turbine and test it.

Get a chance to make a real difference for people and nature. Discover Earthwise Aware (EwA)’s work documenting nature in the Greater Boston Area, why it is critical, and how you can volunteer or intern with us.

The natural world starts right here where we live: in our cities, our streets, our gardens, our public green spaces, parks, and reservations. This means you can have an extraordinary, positive impact on our natural world, helping grassroots environmental organizations do the work that matters because the outcomes are concrete and empower communities. When you engage with EwA, you help protect urban biodiversity, including native species and pollinators, documenting invasives and monitoring habitats while mentoring our future environmental leaders and coaching our communities. By doing so, you contribute to a thriving, healthy planet.

Booth activity: Learn how to document species, their life cycles, and their interactions with their habitat.

Come and see some of the top Massachusetts high school robotics teams play robotics matches against each other. Which robot can put the cones on the polls fastest? Come and watch as the robots battle it out. Also, stop by the team tables and talk to the students about their work and learn about how they built their bots.

Get to know your BUtiful brain with our hands-on activities, including games and optical illusions that will blow your mind. Explore brain structure and function with our anatomical models. Engage in exciting dialogue with neuroscience graduate students by asking us your favorite questions about the brain!

Kids get to see, pet, hold, and learn about a selection of our amazing arthropods that we bring to our educational enrichment events!

Highlander Robotics student team members will showcase and explain this year’s competition winning robot.

Come explore robots + artificial intelligence with the Personal Robots
Group from the MIT Media Lab! We will demo our social robot Jibo and
share interactive activities to learn about AI.

Learn how structural engineers consider forces when designing structures and build you own Jenga tower! Test the strength of your tower by trying to knock it down with the Hulk Hands!

Embark on a journey of self-discovery as you create a 3D Identity Map, exploring the intricate connections between your diverse identities. You’ll use string and pegs to construct a visual representation of the dynamic relationships between your identities, examining their synergies, tensions, and impact on your sense of self.

Circuit Lab teaches electronics and computer programming classes to kids ages 5-14.  We will be bringing interactive demonstrations of some of our classroom projects for participants to play and experiment with.

We will bring a number of child-friendly activities that teach kids about the brain and how we read and process language. These activities may involve looking at a real-time spectrogram of a child’s voice to “see what they say” and hands-on learning activities to show parts of the brain we use for reading and language. We will also provide the opportunity for parents to learn about family-oriented resources related to speech and literacy development.

How do you turn ordinary milk into an explosion of color?! With just a few common kitchen items, we will show you how to turn milk into a rainbow created by hydrophilic and hydrophobic molecules in these ingredients. It’s fun science that you can explore and do at home!

Join us for hands on plasma and magnet activities, and to learn about research being done at MIT!

Add a little math to your day! The National Museum of Mathematics is pleased to present an afternoon of math fun for all ages with some of its most popular math exhibits. Slice geometric shapes with lasers to find surprising shapes hidden within, build forms that roll in unusually funny ways, and participate in a giant group construction of the Hyperbolic Rainbow, led by mathematician Chaim Goodman-Strauss, author of a ground-breaking new math paper. Bring your friends and the entire family for some exciting mathematical edutainment!

Meet Athena, an underwater robot built by students in Arcturus, the MIT marine robotics team! While you’re here, check out our water blaster and ball launcher. Stick around and you can assemble your own pocket-sized water vehicle.

Spot the difference between a space rock and an Earth rock, hold a piece of solar system history, and learn about the ongoing exploration of outer space.

Simple demonstrations for complex scientific concepts! Demos include “weather in a tank”, “ocean acidification in a cup”, and “Earthquake on a table.” Come by to learn about our outreach activities and how to organize a visit by MIT scientists to your classroom!

Stop by the Info Booth and grab some MIT.Nano swag! But be quick – it won’t last forever!

Interactive, hands-on activities which make learning the laws of physics fun and accessible. Our demonstrations explore physics phenomena using everyday household materials and scientific equipment. We invite you to explore the fundamental properties of physics, and engage in conversations with Clark University Physics students and faculty.

We will demonstrate a home-built horn antenna radio telescope for observing 21 cm wavelength radio emission from neutral atomic hydrogen gas in the Milky Way. Plans and parts-list for building your own such telescope will be distributed. With such a telescope you can make your own map of the distribution of atomic hydrogen gas in our Galaxy, and measure its rotation.

When it rains, where does all the water go? Come use a 3D interactive model to find out, and explore what’s happening both above and beneath the surface of our streets and homes.

Choose a piece of paper, a pen, give the pendulums a push, and try to guess how the drawing will develop! Blend different kinds of motion to explore the drawing space or simply watch how other drawings develop. Or crank the gears on the epicycloid machine to watch frequencies determine symmetry!

Immerse yourself in space – and a take a picture to capture your discoveries!

Work hands-on with polymers to discover the magic of material science!

Gene editing technology gives us the power to edit the DNA of all living things. With this power comes important questions about if, when, where, why, and how to use this technology. Many people wonder about the risks and benefits of gene editing to modify human traits, or applications in health, agriculture, and the environment. ‘Reprogrammed’ is an exhibit designed to engage attendees of all ages in thought and conversation about scientific, ethical, personal, and social issues related to gene editing technology. Meet members of the Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd) team from Harvard Medical School to play gene editing trivia and imagine your edited future with prompts on the statement scale.

We are holding a Robot Petting Zoo where we teach younger children how to drive our competition robots, which is an engaging and inspiring experience for many. Furthermore, we will more information about our team and FIRST, as we display our portfolios, PR packets, and Engineering Notebooks. Overall, it is a great experience to engage with the local community and share our love for STEM and robotics.

Multiple mini robotics activities for all ages! Come drive our competition robot (scoring cones on different poles), creating DIY pins, navigating mini sphero robots through a maze, and building LEGO creations. Learn more about robotics at the high school level and the experiences of girls in STEM.

Rare’s interactive exhibits are 5 impressive, mobile booths that travel around Greater Boston to engage a variety of audiences. So far, they have appeared at the Peabody Essex Museum, Savor the Square in Roxbury, Boston GreenFest, the South Boston Street Fest, the Boston Marathon Expo, and Brandeis University. In 2023 alone, they have garnered over 2 million impressions both in person and digitally.

Americans want to take action to prevent climate change. But can individuals really make a difference? Rare’s research shows that shifting your personal behavior can meaningfully reduce emissions, save you money and improve your health. Rare’s #ClimateCulture Pop-Up Exhibits highlight the most impactful actions you can take and why making these changes is easier than you think. By sharing your commitment, you can help shift social norms – the unwritten rules of what is acceptable within a society or culture – paving the way for the wide-spread change we need to stop climate change. Visitors can explore and interact with the exhibit to learn more about how Bostonians are shifting the climate culture.

With the rising popularity of generative AI tools such as Chat-GPT and DALL-E, it can be increasingly difficult to tell the difference between AI-generated content and human-generated content. Join the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) to learn about how generative AI works and see if you can spot the difference. Ask the same question to a virtual physicist and a real live physicist and see what answers you get! Then test your skills by comparing galaxy images from the James Webb Space Telescope with Dall-E generated galaxy images—can you tell which ones are real?

You are an engineer tasked with building a tower out of straws! Your tower needs to be at least one foot tall and once completed, support the weight of a book. The only materials you can use are straws and masking tape.

Students will have the opportunity to explore syGlass, a software platform for the visualization of real massive scientific datasets. A virtual reality narration recorded by a real scientist will take them through a lesson on different topics of their choice including neuroscience, anatomy, and environmental science.

Do you think all living things have the same or different amounts of DNA? At our booth, you will perform an experiment with supplies from your kitchen to answer this question! You’ll also learn a few fun facts about DNA and the scientists who have advanced our knowledge of our genetic makeup.

Complete the scavenger hunt, available throughout CSF week at mitpressbookstore.mit.edu, then pick up your prize at the MIT Press Bookstore and enter a drawing for a chance to win a $50 bookstore gift card!

Scan this QR code to get started!

Be a scientist for a whole day! Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research program in the United States. Learn how the research taking place at the Mass General Research Institute today will lead to better care for patients—like you—tomorrow and in the future.

From a coloring book with exciting science facts to fun experiments to teach you about the human body and the fascinating way it works! Stop by our Cambridge Science Festival booth to learn from the brightest minds in scientific research who work to find solutions and treatments to help save people’s lives every day.

1.
Color your life with science!
Learn how Mass General physicians and scientists work together to understand how the human body works and how they are studying it to come up with solutions to save people’s lives via a fun coloring book!

2.
Scientist for a day!
Learn alongside Mass General Research Institute investigators and explore the science of health and medicine through fun, interactive experiments.

From germs to cells, genes to vaccines, our researchers are exploring all areas of biomedicine. Hopefully, after this, you’ll be a scientist for more than just a day!

Participants follow a tree of traits and place a token in a jar that corresponds to the end of their tree. Which trait combinations will be the most common in Cambridge?

Visit our booth to explore different ways of translating life sciences into pictures. Learn why drawing is important and try your hand! Suitable for all ages.

Help sort the trash from the treasure – compost and recycling! Do you get confused about what can be recycled? Are you skeptical that items get made into new products? Find what we can give a second life to and discover what materials bring recycling sorting machines to a stop.

Learn the art of paper cutting! Experience the beauty of Kirigami and try your hand at creating your own stunning paper sculptures, with expert guidance from celebrated paper cutting artist Quinten Jin.

Prepare to transcend the boundaries of time and gravity, embarking on a journey of lyrical tribute to the women who propelled STEM to new dimensions. “Verses of Visionaries: Women in STEM” is your invitation to learn about and pen the legacy of brilliance and celebrate incredible women in STEM. An immersive experience hosted by highschool students passionate about fostering diversity, inclusivity and bridging the STEM gender gap.

Come see a competition robot designed, built, and programmed by high school students. You can talk with the students about how it was built, learn more about robotics opportunities in your area, and take home your very own team mascot – a rubber duck.

Social psychology research, fun facts about virtue, and surveys/activities related to virtue!

There’s a whole wide world of science, math, and technology out there, and women+ are– and have always been– an essential part of it. If you’re ready to learn about cool women+ scientists from across history, dive deeper into a passion for physics, botany or math, or just curious to learn something new, this is the right place. At our booth, we’ll have worksheets and hands-on interactive activities that tie into the science of some of the women+ we’ve profiled on our website (wowstem.org).