The Puzzle: Blog

We love the city we work in, and we love even more the chance to give back to the community we are fortunate to be a part of. On Friday, July 22, the CS&A Boston office spent the day giving back to the community we love in a way that we hold very close to our hearts: teaching children.

Education is our passion at CS&A and many of us come from school backgrounds, both as teachers and administrators. When thinking about how we wanted to spend the day out in our community, it was without question that working with children was at the top of our list. We chose to partner with Boston Cares, a non-profit organization that coordinates volunteer opportunities with other area non-profits. As the largest volunteer agency in New England, Boston Cares fills thousands of volunteer positions each year and offers a full range of opportunities to get involved. Together, we held an interactive STEM Fair for students in summer programming at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester.

At the STEM Fair, students rotated between three STEM-based experiments we set up. First they were challenged to build a device that would prevent an egg from cracking when dropped from the top of a ladder, while learning about gravity and how materials interact with each other. At a second station, students used a Van de Graaff generator to determine which materials conduct static electricity the best (everyone's favorite part was making Rice Krispies Cereal fly!). Creativity was at all-time high at the third experiment where students designed roller coasters from foam tubing, seeing how many loops they could add before the marble lost kinetic energy and fell off the track.

We're not sure who had more fun, the CS&A Boston office or the kids! For us, the day was an important way to make a difference in our community, showing future engineers and scientists that learning can truly be fun. Check out some of our reflections below.

It was just wonderful to feel the enthusiasm, excitement, and creativity of kids wanting to experiment, build, and understand.

It was truly rewarding to see how much the children appreciated adults dedicating their time to them. I really enjoyed getting to see how many different kids approached the same problem. I was in the egg drop group and while there were similarities, not two designs were the same! We work with the administrative side of education so it really gave perspective to see the other side of the coin, so to speak.

I'm so grateful to have worked alongside the wonderful people at Boston Cares and to help the kids enjoy themselves in their summer days!

I loved the amount of young girls taking charge within the groups, just being confident enough to speak up and brainstorm aloud! With STEM and in life we need to encourage these young girls to speak their mind. Girls do not have to be the submissive and quiet ones of the group, especially when it comes to STEM-related fields or activities.

We had about a 40% success rate in the egg drop experiment where it seemed kids had as much fun picking out their team name as they did crafting their egg cradling apparatus.

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