Drop in at Washington Square Park anytime this Sunday, June 1, for The Ultimate Science Street Fair, our annual free outdoor extravaganza celebrating science! We’ve packed the day with hundreds of hands-on experiences for families and kids of all ages, with big focuses on Space, Weather, and Robots (details below). Working closely with partners like NASA, the Liberty Science Center, NOAA and many, many more, we’ve created interactive experiments and installations, simulators and performances, and lots more designed to delight and inspire your family with a day of science they’ll never forget.
FOCUS ON: SPACE
The cosmos has never been closer to home than the Street Fair’s Space exhibits, where visitors can indulge their inner astronauts. Space fun will include:
• Meet NASA astronauts and space scientists
• Climb into a real flight simulator
• Experience microgravity with a (miniature) drop tower
• Build space planes, control satellites, and design radiation protection for the next generation of astronauts
• Interact with cutting-edge science experiments on the International Space Station
• Explore space toilets, antigravity boots, a micro-jet and a hovercraft
FOCUS ON: WEATHER
Extreme Weather activities will offer visitors many fun and interactive ways to learn about the impacts of climate change and how we’re improving predictions of catastrophic events. Weather programs include:
• Get caught in a hurricane simulator, and learn to construct earthquake-proof structures
• Watch weather unfold dramatically across the planet on a giant projection sphere from NOAA
• Create a high pressure storm in a bottle
• Excavate shark teeth and other fossils, and see how weather affects fossil formation
• Examine microscopic crustaceans inside a solar-powered, state-of-the-art mobile biology lab
• Learn how to predict weather with math, and how extreme weather affects animals
FOCUS ON: ROBOTS
Come meet—and interact directly with—dozens of the coolest robots around, and learn firsthand how automatons are learning to sense, plan, act, and interact with humans. Robotics fun includes:
• See how animal robots like robotic fish and “TurtleBot” take on specialized tasks
• Watch drones take off and wheeled robots zoom around a track
• Help a planetary rover gather rock samples
• Use electricity from your brain to control robots, and drive a robotic arm on wheels through an obstacle course
• Meet robots that shoot hoops, do brain surgery, and play Rock, Paper, Scissors
• Explore early videogames and wind-up proto-robots at the Computer and Invention show
Street Fair Participants:
Col. Michael S. Hopkins, NASA Astronaut
Michael J. Massimino, NASA Astronaut
Bobak Ferdowsi, Mars Curiosity Flight Director aka “Mohawk Guy”
Andrea Hanson, NASA Engineer
Steve Howell, Project Scientist, NASA Kepler mission
Bill Yosses, White House Pastry Chef
The World Science Festival welcomes organizations and universities from all over the world to our street fair. Our 2014 festival gives special thanks to the American Museum of Natural History, Bowdoin College, braiNY, Brown University, Con Edison, the Franklin Institute, International Flavors and Fragrances, Inc., the International Space Apps Challenge, the International Space Station, Italian Institute of Technology’s iCub Laboratory, the Liberty Science Center, Lynn Brunelle, MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group, Mad Science, MoMath, NASA, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Glenn Research Center, NASA’s Johnson Space Center, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NOAA, NY1 NYC FIRST, NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, Science Teacher Sarah, The Think Tank, Time Warner, the Traveling Space Museum, University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Yale University’s Social Robotics Laboratory.
