Maker & micro:bit Day

Two quick payoffs: free a hidden moving part from "slime," and snap the hooks you designed on Day 1.

Slime reveal: some 3D prints use a special support material that dissolves in water. You peeled the gooey leftovers off a print to free a part that actually moves — printed in one piece! Hook snap: remember your Day-1 hook? We hung weights on each one until it broke, and scored them by how much they held. Big snap = big cheer.

You wired real sensors to a micro:bit and coded them into useful gadgets.

At three build stations (with a high-school helper at each), you connected sensors and wrote the code to make them do something — a burglar alarm, an automatic nightlight, or a little weather station that reads temperature and light. This is exactly how real smart-home gadgets work: sense something, then react.

You assembled a working Bluetooth + FM speaker, decorated the case, and played your own music through it.

No soldering — just screws and snaps — but the result is the real deal: an amplifier, a speaker driver, and a battery you put together yourself. Then you paired a phone over Bluetooth and heard your song come out of the thing you built.

You split a single candy color into the hidden rainbow of dyes inside it — and watched water climb uphill.

This is chromatography: put a dot of candy dye on a paper strip, dip the bottom in water, and the water carries the colors up the paper. Heavier dyes move slower, lighter ones zoom ahead — so one brown or green candy splits into surprising bands. The water creeping up the paper on its own? That's capillary action, the same trick plants use to drink.

As a team, you built a bridge between two bins that holds itself up with no glue at all.

You cut foam blocks into wedge shapes, stacked them over a curved form, and dropped in the keystone in the middle. When you pulled the form away… it stood! Each block pushes on its neighbors, so the whole arch squeezes itself together. Smaller, more blocks = harder = more points.