WMG’s Outreach team was pleased to play a part in the University of Warwick’s Winter Wonderland Family Day early this month.

The Team put together a series of STEM activities each with a special festive twist including:

Merry Stitchmas: software and control

Professor Margaret Low and Helen Luckhurst hosted a festive craft drop-in session introducing the public to coding in a creative context, with children and their families used Turtlestitch to write a computer program. This was then inputted into WMG’s digital embroidery machine. They watched the machine stitch their designs onto felt, then cut them out and added a loop of string to make tree decorations.

X-Peri-Mas

There’s never a better time to tinker with some science and engineering than over the Christmas holidays. Everyone is inside and there’s plenty of things in the kitchen cupboards to raid for experiments.

 Phil Jemmett put on a show of science and engineering tricks that young people could recreate at home over the Christmas holidays. Volunteers learned how to do tricks like making a rainbow pattern on a water surface, creating a tornado in a bottle, turning a jar full of water upside down without a lid and (usually) without making a mess, and how to do rocket science with fuel from the kitchen.

 Miniature Race Track

Staff from the WMG Graduate Development Scheme gave children and their families an introduction to autonomous technology with children guiding their driverless vehicles around a festive miniature racetrack. The vehicle was a self-driving reindeer robot pulling a 3D-printed sleigh that the children had decorated. They were given an insight into the technology inside autonomous vehicles and how they worked, exploring how objects were identified and tackling winter driving scenarios.

 Find out more about WMG’s Outreach activities here.