 For the Loving the Gear session, parents and students will start the evening out with activities to do together for about 20 minutes. You will do fun, science, engineering and technology activities together. So let's get your science on. Kirsten will now give you a brief demonstration of each activity to get you started. Did you realize that we have 20 small receptors and 5 taste receptors? Today we are going to see how well our senses are without our sense of sight. For this activity, it is important that you make sure you inform your educator of any and all food allergies that you may have. For experiment one, put on your blindfold and we are going to sample liquids A and B. Can you figure out the difference between the tastes? For experiment two, keep your blindfold on and this time plug your nose. The samples here have similar textures. Can you figure out the difference between the two samples? This next activity, we will be learning how visual sensors work in robotics. We will be constructing our own binoculars and testing our own visual sensors. Your finished product will look like this. To put this together, add a scrap piece of paper in between the two tubes right here to make a space between the tubes. Tape the tubes together on both ends. Then, we will add the two pencils at the end on the outside of both of the tubes. Finally, we are going to create the blender. We will trace both of the ends here on a piece of paper. When you have it traced, we will cut the two circles out and attach it like so. Team member of your group lay down a strip of tape on your piece of paper that is 2 feet long. Make sure that it winds around so it isn't too straight. At a time from your group will be the sensor. Looking through the top of the binoculars and keeping the pencils between the tape down below, they will walk along and trace the tape on the paper. With different lengths of the binoculars, you can trade with other people in the class and compare your observations. As most of you have folded a paper airplane before. Today we are going to try something a little bit different. We are going to make gliders that can soar up to 10 feet. However, I am going to challenge you to not fold or bend the index cards. Using the materials provided, experiment with creating your own glider. We have paper clips, binder clips, masking tape, 3x5 index cards, and 5x8 index cards. And measure the distance that applies. Next, using two index cards, masking tape, one binder clip, or six paper clips. We are going to connect the two index cards with masking tape. First, try flying this like this and measure the distance. After measuring the distance of this, we are going to add some weight. You can use any combination of the materials provided. Once you have added the weight to your glider, experiment on different areas of the glider that you can put your weight. And then measure its distance. Notice that your glider may not have flown straight. We may need to add a little more detail. For the next activity, we are going to create a tail for the back of the wing. I have a couple examples of tails that could be used over here, but it's certainly not the only kind. Here is an example of the finished glider with the tail. Create your tail and connect it to the back and measure the distance of how far the sun flies. The materials added for this part of the activity, we have two drinking straws and two thin rubber bands. First, we are going to connect the two drinking straws to make it longer. We can do this by pinching one end of the straw and connecting it with the other straw. To connect the straw to your front wing, put the rubber band on the straw. The straw on top of your front wing. We are going to pull the rubber band all the way around, making sure that the front wing is angled in a V shape. Measure the distance of your final product. Here is just one example of the finished glider. We have the tail, body, front wing and the weight. All of these activities will spark a future interest in the science, technology and engineering fields for you today.