Take Your Child to Work Day

Recently, Luke and Abbey (and I) got to experience a day at Drew's work.  Honestly, before that day neither child really understood what daddy does at work besides "work on computers."  Drew's actual job title is "Senior Software Engineer", and he got to show the kids what all that entails on take your child to work day.   In addition, his company had a ton of really fun STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) activities planned for the kiddos.   I meant to bring our camera to document this fun day, but completely forgot.  Thankfully though, I always have my phone camera.  :-)

Walking into daddy's work

They begged to cross the water on the stones on the way to picking up our work security badges.

 First, we had to get our work badges.  Luke and Abbey loved their badges.  They also received a fun "goody bag" full of great surprises, including a random "Wooly Willy" toy, which I loved playing with as a child.

They were pretty excited about those badges...and the goody bags.

 A firetruck and a police k-9 unit vehicle were also there at the "take your child to work day" event, for the kids to explore.

You can see here though, Abbey seems more excited still about the work badge than the cool firetruck she is sitting in.  :-)

for comparison purposes, we had them stand in front of the fire truck's tire so they could see how large it was.

We also got to look through two separate extremely strong solar telescopes.  One telescope used a white light filter, highlighting sun spots.  The other was a hydrogen-alpha scope that showed details on prominences and filaments.

I know the event was called take your child to work day, but Drew and I really enjoyed all the events too.  I was pretty excited to check out the telescopes and view the details of the sun.

We headed to Drew's office for just a bit before the next event.  As you can see, his photos need some serious updating!  Those photos of the kids are from a few years ago.  I am going to get on that soon!  :-)

One of our favorite activities of the day was "Dr. Kold."  Dr. Kold, who is actually a retired IBM employee with a PhD in low temperature physics, demonstrated the properties of liquid nitrogen and other materials at low temperatures.  This was so cool--literally, ha!  The kids learned about each of the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas).  We also got to see the transitions of the various states happen right before our eyes, learning about sublimation, deposition, vaporization, etc.  He used the cold gases to make bubbles when adding dish soap to dry ice.  He did so many fun experiments right before our eyes.  But, of course, the favorite of the audience was when he made ice cream in 19 seconds. He then gave samples out to everyone.  :-)

Although the activities didn't give the kids a great idea of what Drew does on a day-to-day basis, they were excellent STEM activities: aimed to get the kids excited about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), each of which Drew uses regularly.

Another great STEM activity was the bridge building event.  Kids created bridges out of dry spaghetti and marshmallows.

Then, after it was finished, we had to see how strong it was by adding as many pieces of candy as possible before it fell apart.  We eventually criss-crossed many spaghetti noodles along the bottom to hold the candy. 

 

In this room, they also had a white board (as a "photo booth") and some fun props that the kids could use.  Then, we used our phones to take their photo.  I think these two sillies are pretty cute!

Next, it was time to see what Drew really does when he goes to work....

First, he took us to the pairing lab.  The pairing lab is where Drew and another employee share a computer (each with their own screen) when they are working on specific code.   It is a great way to collaborate and perform code reviews simultaneously.   The kids liked some of the "toys" that were in the room.  Like this really cool dart gun.

Here, Luke is using the "machine gun" dart gun.  It was super cool!

It shot rounds onto the dart board.

But, this still didn't give the kids a great idea of what Drew does as a job.  So, we went back to his office for him to show us what he works on.

Drew explained to the kids how he writes code (on the screen on the left) which creates a working application (like the screen on the right).  

The easiest way to explain it to them was to tell them that daddy writes code that creates applications, much like the games they play on the ipad.  Luke was pretty excited to do some coding himself--which he would get to the following week at Lego robotics camp.

What an awesome "take your child to work" day!