Oceana Air Show Outdoor STEM Laboratory 2024

  POSTED ON: Sunday, September 22, 2024 12:00 AM by Antje Hlavaty

The USNA STEM Center participated in the Oceana Air Show Outdoor STEM Laboratory in Virginia Beach, VA from September 20-22, 2024. The STEM Laboratory has been sponsored by NAS Oceana since 2016 as part of their annual Air Show, and consists of developmentally appropriate, hands-on activities that engage and inspire students for career opportunities in STEM. Debbie Patch, Oceana NAS School Liaison Officer, coordinated the STEM Laboratory and worked with Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) and Chesapeake Public Schools to bring over 8,000 fifth-grade students to the STEM Laboratory and Airshow on the Friday before the public show.

Supported by a USNA STEM Center staff member, two ONR Reservists and seven MIDN engaged students in hands-on activities including designing and launching straw rockets, engineering challenges to explore the force of buoyancy, solving puzzles and ciphers as part of cryptography, and electrical etching to make dog tags. While having the opportunity to talk with military personnel about career paths and options, the students were engaged and inspired with STEM topics.

With the backdrop of flight shows taking place while students explored the activities set-up in flight hangars and flight line tents, it was certainly easy to see that, “The NAS Oceana Air Show is a way for us to inspire the next generation of leaders, because you never know who will walk away from that special weekend believing that they, too, can dream big and Fly Navy”.  

The culmination for the students was watching the performance of the Navy’s premiere flight demonstration team, the Blue Angels. The public portion of the event on Saturday and Sunday drew over 150,000 attendees including children of all ages. 

Category: General Interest