Both Head O' Meadow Elementary School and Sandy Hook Elementary School held annual STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) Night events on Thursday, February 16, for students and family members.

Head O' Meadow math/science specialist Chrissie Pierce oversaw the evening at her school. The event included having students and parents participate in a range of activities at different stations set up in the school's cafeteria.

EverWonder Children's Museum offered some of the activities for the evening, with museum representatives overseeing stations involving magnets.

Ms Pierce said she challenged parents to be "hands on" with activities this year, and around the cafetorium students and their parents sat near one another to complete tasks.

At one station, families worked together to solve an architecture structure problem. At another, students stepped up to an engineering challenge by building sails for wooden cars to move when placed in front of a fan.

Students also used iPads to practice coding through different apps, and at an estimation station students estimated how much candy was in two jars.

Head O' Meadow educators, administrators, and PTA members all were present for the evening, volunteering at the different stations.

Sandy Hook School's Egg-Drop Challenge

Roughly 40 fourth grade families signed up to attend the evening event at Sandy Hook School, which was overseen by math/science specialist Kris Feda and volunteer staff and former students.

For the evening, Ms Feda said as she welcomed attendees, activities would be held for everyone to "engage in a little bit of science fun." To begin, students worked together to study matter, forces, and motion.

Students began the night's activities by noting what happened when they dropped different objects into bins filled with sand. As fourth graders Rebecca Holland and Avery Donahoe noted, dropping an item "made a hole" in the sand. Fourth graders Nadia Fan and Stephen Sibley noted the more speed an object had, the larger the impact was on the sand.

"Excellent observations," Ms Feda said to the group as a whole, after multiple students shared what they learned from the experiment.

The activity was just a warm-up for the evening's surprise main experiment.

Ms Feda unveiled a large offering of collected items on the stage of the school's cafetorium as she told the group the evening's main activity would be to design and test a container that would protect an egg from breaking when dropped from the second story of the school down to the first floor. All of the items were recycled items collected by teachers, Ms Feda said, and the students could choose from any of the items to design their object.

Plastic bags, food containers, padded envelopes, egg cartons, and cereal box cardboard were just some of the items available for the designs. Once the designs were finalized, students and parents tested the creations by dropping them from the second floor down to the floor of the school's main lobby. Following the evening, Ms Feda said it was a "great success."