The Lake Quinault School District hosted its third annual “STEAM Family Night” March 14 at the Amanda Park school. Over 200 students and parents attended demonstrations and hands-on activities in areas related to “science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics.”

The event this year carried a “Pi Day” theme because it took place on March 14, or 3/14, which refers to the mathematical expression of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, 3.14. Fourteen activities were offered involving circles, cylinders, spheres and other concepts related to pi. Appropriately, the event was capped off with a family favorite meal item that usually starts as a circle: pizza pie.

The idea is simply “to get parents out with their children, and participate in learning activities that are fun,” according to Rich DuBois, superintendent of the Lake Quinault School District. He also praised the faculty of the small rural school.

“This is teacher-run,” he said. “They planned it, organized it, put it together, and they run it. That’s (part of) what’s great about it.”

DuBois was pleased to see the large turnout of parents, and noted some of the challenges the school faces. It is the poorest district in Grays Harbor County, he said, and it covers a huge, sparsely populated area from Humptulips to Queets, a distance of more than 40 miles. The school has 170 students from preschool age through high school.

Diane Golob, a kindergarten and first grade teacher, said the annual event is intended “to celebrate STEAM, and is trying to get families involved in education.” Her activity was making “pi bracelets” using colored beads to represent the numbers in pi, carried out to 21 decimal places.

One of the demonstrations drawing a lot of interest was offered by the school’s remotely operated vehicle team, called the Expeditioners. Five students in Michael Kenney’s middle-school science class designed and built an underwater robotic vehicle, and they entertained fellow students and parents as they practiced maneuvering their ROV at the event.

Kenney explained that he went to a robotics workshop last fall, and has since received “such an overwhelming response” to the after-school robotics team he formed. The team and teacher spend two hours together twice weekly, and this was their first effort at building an ROV.

In the past month, Kenney said, team members Brandon Dudley, Aldo Lopez, Emmanuel Venegas, Dawson Lines and Cristo Maldonado “soldered all the electrical connections, wired the control box, and they’re now in the design and test phase to see which works best.”

Kenney said the team will compete in May at a regional event in Forks, part of a national competition put on by the nonprofit Marine Advanced Technology Education Center.

Photo by Scott d. Johnston Lake Quinault high school science teacher Erica Waggoner works with some of her students to estimate the volumes of various cylinders during a Pi Day activity at STEAM Family Night on March 14.