Our local grade school just held a science night. We go to all the nights, math, science, art night! Art night the parking lot is packed! Not so for math and science. Art night the kids preform and their items are on display whereas math and science night include hands on science and math activities. For science night, we got to do activities that included volume, cars and coefficient of drag using a fan with racing matchbox cars, arches, and engineering and building an aluminum foil boat. The nice thing was that there were no lines, all the activities were open to try. The kids that did come were having a GREAT time. The question is how to get more kids to attend? Was it because there were no scripted activities like performances that the students were included in? No pictures or papers hanging on the walls to check out how our students have done?
The other thought I had was if there had been a large turn out, would everyone have enjoyed it as much? The activities were all hands on. A large turn out would have required waiting at each table. I know we tend to avoid activities where we will have a lot of standing around waiting around and waiting our turn.
What’s a good way to get a better turn out? Are there activities for larger groups at one time? All in all though we enjoyed science night ourselves, but we were very disappointed with the low turn out – just for what it says about the general publics thoughts on science in general.