I will have lots of chamber and business news to share in the coming weeks, including February networking events (Feb. 19 and Feb. 26), our annual award winners (releasing this Friday) and some updates on policies affecting us locally, statewide and nationally. However, as I continue to preach about the importance of engagement in our community, I had an experience last week that I must tell you about as it is a prime example on how to bring community together.

As loyal readers and chamber members know, one of my favorite sayings comes from a collection of essays written by former news journalist and nightly news anchor Dan Rather, and it is this: “Familiarity is a necessary ingredient for acceptance.” On the surface, it is a simple phrase, but the more you consider it, the more complex it becomes. It’s a phrase that tells us that we don’t need to necessarily be affected by something to understand it, but at the very least we must be familiar with those impacted by it and what it means to them in order to accept it. It’s profound in its accuracy, as I bet you can point to a moment or two in your life when you were scared about something you had never experienced or people you have never been around. Yet, once you had this experience or encountered these people and found common ground, it became much less scary or threatening. The civil rights movement was based on this.

However, it also means that you can’t only talk to someone about something and expect them to become familiar with it. You need to give people experiences for them to gain familiarity. Think about skydiving — you can tell someone all about it, and some may become familiar with the idea of it, but you don’t really know how invigorating it can be until you step out of that plane with a chute on. Familiarity implies more than just awareness; familiarity implies a degree of experiential moments.

That’s what I loved so much about the STEM Night held last Thursday at Mt. Ararat High School. For starters, the administration and staff at Maine School Administrative District 75 did an incredible job of recruiting businesses and supporting faculty to do demonstrations for families and students. But also, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can be scary to some people. I know many of my friends in the arts who don’t really have any interaction with the sciences, and that is just fine by them. However, STEM is a career pathway we need more students in, and the high school did an outstanding job of giving families an experiential night.

For starters, before you even entered the high school, you got to see the incredible “interactive job simulator on wheels” that General Dynamics/Bath Iron Works had located right outside the front entrance. This trailer is loaded with virtual reality googles and equipment and they bring it all around the state to showcase career opportunities to students and adults. You can simulate welding with a wand they give you, driving a forklift, painting with a spray gun, climbing staging and more. This technology gives an impression of what hands-on means at the shipyard in a way that everyone can experience.

Then once you got inside, there was an information table that gave you a map to the 50-plus displays on hand. The cafeteria had a dozen or more businesses who came in with their interactive displays from showcasing the high precision manufacturing components they make to videos showing the medical products they manufacture in action and the tools that create them. The library had visual arts demonstrations where students were showing how they use iPads to create visual displays. Across the hall from that was a submersible robot lab where student groups build robots that go underwater and maneuver obstacle courses made of plastic pipes. The teams have to design the robots to avoid the pipes while executing specific missions in a statewide competition (which Mt. Ararat has won twice!).

Advertisement

The classroom exhibits were my favorite, though. Do you know how they figure out the calorie counts for food? Did you know they just light food on fire?! Yeah. Maybe you knew that. I did NOT know that. Once the teacher explained the rationale, it made sense, as calories measure how much energy you need to burn. What they do, basically, is have some water at baseline temperature, light the food underneath it and however many degrees the water increases in temperature from the energy expended by the burning food gets converted into joules and then converted into calories. Of course, a classroom isn’t a sealed food lab, so there was some loss of energy, but the demonstration showed the rationale in action, and students and families had a ball watching Doritos and pretzels go up in flames.

Another room had a 10-minute presentation on the renewable energy infrastructure of the school building itself, which is still very new, and why that initial investment will pay for itself several times over during the life of the building. Then a student led a tour of the building so you could see the water heaters and components of the building that were discussed in the presentation.

Then there were the remote-control cars students built. And the Lego robots. And the color-coded vehicles that students programmed to follow certain paths. It was a cavalcade of exhibits and so many families showed up to experience it. Some of them, admittedly, were coming to the basketball game and came early, but many more were there for that specific experience.

In the end, these students and these families got more familiar with STEM career opportunities. And for some, it wasn’t as scary after that, and it’s a career they may consider. I regret not bringing my two sons to it — a mistake I don’t intend to make next year.

Cory King is executive director of the Bath-Brunswick Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Join the Conversation

Please sign into your Press Herald account to participate in conversations below. If you do not have an account, you can register or subscribe. Questions? Please see our FAQs.