It’s time for the popular annual Cambridge Science Festival running 10 days (April 15-24, 2016) in Cambridge, MA and throughout New England. The festival, now in its 10th year, is made possible by The MIT Museum, Harvard University, the City of Cambridge, Cambridge Public Schools, the Cambridge Public Library, and the Museum of Science, and generous sponsors and wonderful volunteers. The goal is to reach out to K-12 students, the general public, and the science community, to excite and ignite curiosity with events covering science, technology, engineering, arts and math.
There are over 160 events during the festival and there really is something for everyone. Programs range from robotics to astronomy to solar cars. For example, there is a free Science Carnival and Robot Zoo with many hands-on activities and demonstrations at Cambridge Rindge & Latin Field House and the Cambridge Public Library on Saturday, April 16th.
My daughter and I participated in an Intro to HTML and CSS class last year for girls and their moms… or grandmas, aunts, big sisters! The purpose of the class was to inspire girls and women and teach us how to create our own website using HTML, the standard markup language used to create web pages, and CSS, a style sheet language that gives web pages their visual presentation (colors, fonts, formatting, etc.)
The class was lead by Susan Buck, an instructor at Wellesley College and Harvard Extension School and Co-founder of the Women’s Coding Collective. My daughter and I both loved the class! Susan and the other teacher did a great job teaching the fundamentals of HTML and CSS through instruction, examples, and a lot of hands-on learning. By the end of the class, we had created a couple of pages and had enough understanding of the basics to continue exploring outside of the class.
The Cambridge Science Festival is well-attended and events do fill up. If you are interested in attending programs, visit the event calendar to register and sign up for classes.
2016 Program Details:
Event calendar: Many events require registration
10-day festival runs Friday, April 15- Sunday, April 24
Participants: All ages
Location: Cambridge, MA and locations throughout New England
Cost: Many events are free or charge a small fee
Image source: DIYbio Boston at the Cambridge Science Festival by Mackenzie Cowell
