When Thousands of Families Came Together to Explore STEM

Inside one museum, children, parents, volunteers, and community partners turned a day of hands-on activity into thousands of small encounters with curiosity.

The museum doors are still closed, but the building is already awake. Volunteers straighten materials that will not remain straight for long. Exhibitors make last adjustments to screens, circuits, and equipment. A robot powers on. Somewhere nearby, tape is being found, a question is being answered, and one more table is being shifted a few inches before anyone can call the room ready.

Outside, families have begun to gather. Children lean toward the glass for a better look. Parents study the entrance, then the growing line, quietly making the calculation familiar to anyone arriving at a large family event: Where do we begin?

For a few more minutes, the answer can wait. Inside the Cradle of Aviation Museum, aircraft hang above spaces that will soon fill with robotics, drones, virtual reality, clean-energy experiments, slime, circuits, 3D printing, and the untidy work of trying something new. Then the doors open, and planning gives way to motion.

The first choice

The earliest discoveries are not always the most technical. A child spots a station from across the room and pulls an adult in that direction. Another stops close to the entrance, caught between several possibilities. There is no bell assigning everyone the same starting point, so families make their own routes. Some follow the most visible machine. Some choose what looks familiar. Others join a short line simply because the children ahead of them appear to be having fun.

That freedom matters. In school, a teacher usually selects the question and guides a class through it together. At a festival, curiosity makes more of the decisions. One child may want to operate a robot; another would rather mix slime, examine a circuit, or try virtual reality for the first time. The subjects are different, but the first act of learning is the same: choosing to move closer.

Soon, the museum becomes a collection of small scenes. At one table, a child watches closely as a material changes. At another, two young people compare what happened when they tried the same challenge in different ways. A volunteer crouches to explain the next step without taking the project out of a child’s hands. Nearby, someone starts over.

Children working through a robotics challenge together during STEM•X Festival, testing ideas, adjusting their approach, and learning through hands-on problem solving.

The room is loud, but concentration creates its own pockets of quiet. A child who was rushing becomes absorbed in lining up a piece or waiting for a result. Parents lean in. Elsewhere, solar-powered devices, wind turbines, and hydrogen fuel cells bring the festival’s 2025 theme, “Spark the Future with Clean Energy!,” within reach. Developed through Morrison Mentors’ partnership with National Grid, the theme connected scientific ideas to daily life: how energy is produced, what it costs, and how it can be used more efficiently. Whether the task involves a circuit or a clean-energy model, the habits are familiar: notice what happened, adjust, ask for help, try again.

When parents stop watching

Adults often arrive expecting to supervise. Then a headset is offered, a circuit needs another pair of hands, or a child asks a question that the parent cannot answer. The boundary between observer and participant begins to loosen.

Museum learning researchers have long paid attention to this shift. Caregivers do more than keep children moving through an exhibit. Depending on the moment, they become players, interpreters, facilitators, or co-learners. Their involvement can help a child remain with an experience long enough to test a fuller idea, and it changes the conversation that follows (Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education, 2016).

At STEM•X, that shared learning appeared in both the activity spaces and the feedback afterward. One community member remembered trying virtual reality for the first time. Parents described an experience that was engaging for the whole family, not only for the children. The adult who says, “I don’t know, let’s figure it out,” is doing something useful. A child sees that uncertainty is not a reason to leave the table.

At STEM•X, learning often becomes a shared experience as parents and children explore new technologies side by side.

There are social lessons here too, though they do not announce themselves as lessons. Families compare notes about what they have seen. Children waiting for a station watch the attempt before theirs and begin forming a plan. Strangers hold materials, make room, point one another toward an activity, or explain where a line begins. Volunteers translate unfamiliar equipment into an invitation: try this part first.

These exchanges are brief. Most people will never learn one another’s names. Still, they turn a building full of separate visitors into a temporary learning community.

A museum becomes part of the lesson

The setting carries its own argument. The Cradle of Aviation Museum places present-day experiments beneath and beside the history of flight, engineering, and human attempts to solve problems that once seemed impossible. Children move between artifacts built to be observed and activities built to be touched. The distance between invention as history and invention as something a person can attempt becomes a little smaller.

This is close to what the National Research Council described in STEM Learning Is Everywhere. A child’s learning is shaped by overlapping circles: family and friends, teachers and mentors, schools, museums, libraries, community organizations, media, and the wider culture. The strength comes from connection, from an idea encountered in one place meeting a person, tool, or question somewhere else (National Research Council, 2014).

A festival makes the ecosystem visible because its parts occupy one place. That was STEM•X’s broader purpose. Long Island had gone more than a decade without a large-scale public STEM celebration uniting schools, families, and community organizations. Saturday’s Community Day followed Friday’s dedicated School Day, when students and educators from districts on Long Island explored the museum. Across both days, Morrison Mentors and its volunteers created the structure; National Grid, exhibitors, and community partners brought knowledge and equipment. The museum contributed scale and context. Parents supplied encouragement. Children brought interests they might not yet have had words for.

Members of the Morrison Mentors leadership team joined community partners, sponsors, and festival collaborators whose collective efforts helped bring STEM•X to life.

Reservation data offers one view of the demand behind the day. Families claimed 5,416 free tickets for the 2025 STEM•X Festival’s Community Day. During registration, they selected an average of 4.7 of the eight STEM topics listed. They did not seem to be looking for one perfect subject. They wanted room to explore.

The response afterward suggests that many found it. Among 174 people who completed the attendee evaluation, the average overall rating was 4.72 out of 5. Of the parent respondents, 96.8 percent said STEM felt more accessible and exciting for their children. One parent wrote that the day opened her child to areas she had not realized were part of STEM. That is not proof of a lifelong change, and a one-day event should not be asked to provide it. It is evidence of a door becoming visible.

What families carry out

By afternoon, the pace looks different. Some children still move quickly, determined to fit in one more station. Others carry the evidence of the day: a small project, a creation that may not survive the ride home, or an unfinished idea they are reluctant to leave. Parents check the time. Volunteers reset materials again.

Not every moment is effortless. Popular activities draw lines, and a crowded museum requires choices, patience, and navigation. Families later asked for clearer maps, activity previews, age guidance, quieter periods or spaces, and better information about busy times. Those requests matter because free admission alone does not complete the work of access. People also need to understand the space and feel able to participate.

Families explore hands-on STEM experiences throughout the Cradle of Aviation Museum, where every station offers a different path to curiosity and discovery.

The most revealing part of the day may be what continues after a family walks outside. A child explains an activity to someone who missed it. A parent searches for the name of a technology they tried together. An educator carries an idea back to a classroom. In the 2025 evaluation, nine of the 13 educator respondents expected to reference festival activities with their students. The event ends, but the learning ecosystem does not.

Near closing, the museum gradually returns to itself. Families head toward the exits with tired children, folded papers, small projects, and new questions mixed in with everything else they brought that morning. The robots will power down. Tables will be cleared. On the ride home, a child may still be explaining why one attempt worked and another did not, or asking when they can try again.

STEM•X matters not simply because 5,416 tickets were reserved. It matters because thousands of moments of curiosity happened there, one family, one question, and one unfinished idea at a time.

References

Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education. (2016). Family learning in museums. Informal Science. https://informalscience.org/family-learning-museums/

National Research Council. (2014). STEM learning is everywhere: Summary of a convocation on building learning systems. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18818