Sci-What!?!
This guy serenaded us from across the isle during down time.
Sci-Tech! We just got back from Carnegie Science Center’s Annual Sci-Tech Days. This was our fifth year participating in the science and technology festival for middle and high school students at the science center.
Corporate and community participants set up booths to enhance the science center’s already impressive series of exhibits. Among the other participants were Penn State Electro Optics Center, and Quality of Life Technology Center. There were also a ton of other exhibitors, but there are too many to name and these guys just happened to be right across the aisle from us so they were easy to remember! Speaking of other close by exhibits… we were fortunate enough to be right across from the large model train (in case you’re wondering from our blog introduction post, Shandra Williams was not there to enjoy the trains) and robot exhibits.
PSCer Laura McGinnis hosted groups of students each day for a talk that encouraged students to “Think like a computer“ much like the talk she gave about a month ago, which you can read more about here.
Derek and Dave talking with a couple of students.
When students weren’t learning how to think like a computer, they could stop by our booth and participate in a fun math drill. They had to try to finish 60 simple math problems in 60 seconds. We used this exercise to illustrate what a FLOP (floating point operations per second) is and to compare their average of 1 operation per second to our SGI shared memory system, Blacklight, which can execute 37 trillion FLOPS.
It was a fun (and tiring) week and we’re happy to have been a part of such a great event put on by the Carnegie Science Center. Thanks for inviting us!
