STEM BOWL!

Super Community Event: STEM Innovation Bowl

John Schlosser and Angela Ocana

The STEM Innovation Bowl was part of 7 Super Community Events leading up to Super Bowl 50 which involved city collaboration with different departments (IT, CSD) and working together with an unstable budget.  

The discussion covered every element of the planning and marketing of the STEM Innovation Bowl at the Santa Clara Library. (The Program)

The first thought I had was our Star Wars Read event and how we can learn from this event or even combined the two events.

TIPS

1. Be familiar with the flow of the space, fire code, monitoring lines, line queues, etc.
2. All staff on board
3. Communication among all staff before and day of (walkie talkies)
4. Flexibility and Great “on the spot” Thinking
5. Marketing (enote or emess, parent groups, list serve, school boards with parents - news, local STEM schools, traditional media campaign [ flyer, banner], IT, other libraries, and commercial for the Superbowl)

PROS

1. Children's planned event turned into Family & Adult Event
2. 10  Innovation Stations (I did not get product names, but I believe Cara did.)
3. Incentive for Pins at each Station (instead of Stickers or Stamps)
4. Community Engagement with Interactive Exhibits (fortunate to be in Silcom Valley and networking at Maker Faires)
1. Pley
2. Osmo
3. Nvidia  
4. Allied Telesis
5. Leap Motion  [VR]
6. Beam
7. Livelike

CONS

1. Photography is key and essential - they had a "dedicated" person flake out on them.
2. EVENTBRITE- allowing free ticketed events and gives a number (with a projected 50% return rate) FREE tickets / complaints from ticketed patrons for event about non ticketed patron who were just using library services.  [This would be an interesting service to implement and save paper by promoting FREE tickets online - and this feature is available with Facebook events]
3. Clean Up all the trash and STEM features
4. CLA Award Winning & Commendation
5. Doing it again ??? - yes- city funded.

NUMBERS

1. One Day - 7 Hours
2. 6800 Tickets (eventbrite)
3. Over 10,000 patrons visit [under estimated by EventBrite]
4. 100 library cards made
5. 6 STEM presentation
6. 8 Company exhibits
7. 10 Creation/ Innovation Stations
8. 30 Staff & 60 Volunteers
9. Budget: $13,000

The presenters will be at CLA for anyone interested or if you had questions I have the following contact information: aocana@santaclaraca.gov  AND jschlosser@santaclaraca.gov

TAKEAWAYS

   This session reminded me of what we are doing with SWR and how massive it can be and how working with community or local makerspace type vendors (for free for the publicity). The session has also somewhat inspired me to think if Star Wars Reads could be developed into a Con or even a digital literacy event in terms of more STEM. EXCITING IDEAS!