For the fourth year in a row, Berry College’s HackBerry Lab was invited to the Tellus Museum Discovery Days event alongside various technology organizations from around the state of Georgia.
This year, Mariah Kelly, a creative technologies and chemistry double major from Alpharetta, Ga., and Dexter Serrao, a creative technologies major from Bonita Springs, Fla., showcased a new educational technology project called Bitsy Boards, under the supervision of Zane Cochran, clinical instructor of creative technologies. The goal is to bring new, interesting and innovative designs that the HackBerry team has created in the lab to engage the families who come to the museum.
Bitsy Boards are small circuit boards that children can build to make everything from an interactive lamp, to a programmable memory game. Museum visitors were able to experiment with the various boards, as well as solder their own light-up keychain with the HackBerry logo.
“Each year, HackBerry hosts about 600-plus K-12 students from Rome and Floyd County where the lab students engage them in a variety of STEM-related activities,” Cochran said. “The Bitsy Boards came as a result of continuously coming up with new activities to have the kids try.”
Cochran, Kelly, Serrao, and creative technologies major Graham Widmann created a Circuit Fabrication Lab within HackBerry to allow lab students to mass produce circuit board kits that make the Bitsy Boards possible. The lab has already ramped up to support a variety of ongoing student projects ranging from research to entrepreneurship.
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Written by Public Relations Student Supervisor Alexi Bell
