Me and my group presented at the STEAM festival yesterday afternoon and I have to say it was pretty interesting. I was fully expecting to be bored for two hours but I was pleasantly surprised at how many people were there, as well as the diversity of projects, the maker hub, and of course the cookies.

On the project side, I looked at a lot of seminar 3 projects. I was very impressed with a lot of their research and posters. I talked to one group who made a story by drawing it on different pieces of paper and the video was of them drawing what happened in the story. I talked to another group who analyzed soil samples to test bacteria diversity and I thought that was so neat and something I would expect a lab to do. I also talked to one group who talked about art as a uniting force in this diverse world. Another group talked about the benefits of natural areas as aesthetic architectural choices. Basically, a lot of different types of projects. (One group had actual lights being powered by oil, I believe, which was cool considering they were talking about energy generation).

I also really liked the maker hub as I got to make a button and keychain which was very cool. It was very simple to just cut out a circle or draw something and have it be made into whatever you wished. I think it was a good idea to have this section at the festival.

I also think it was interesting to see different classes of Seminar 1 from different colleges had different projects. It was pretty cool to see how different schools made their STEAM projects differently to our audio guides. One of my friends at Hunter compiled a box of things that he and his group thought about when thinking about New York.

One bad thing about my experience, however, was that not many people stopped by our table to listen to our project. I was somewhat disappointed because my group and I really put effort into making the project well and only two people actually listened to it. I think the size of the festival was too big to pay attention to groups like ours which had a lengthy audio recording while many of the other projects there were simply posters that could be talked about in a minute or less. It might have helped to have a guide of all the projects so people could go see those projects that they were interested in and know where the projects would be.