eDay Walk-Up Activities and Demonstrations
From hands-on activities to live demonstrations and lab tours, Engineering Day offers opportunities for visitors of all ages to explore how engineering works in the real world. Stop by, ask questions, try something new, and see what our students, faculty, and labs are creating.
All activities listed on this page are free and open to everyone! Walk-ins are welcome for any walk-up activity, demonstration, or lab tour.
Walk-Up Activities
These activities are free and open to the public. However, we are asking everyone to register to attend eDay, so we can ensure we are able to accommodate all attendees.
Students are invited to test their precision and problem-solving skills in the CNC Machining Maze Challenge. In this walk-up activity, participants will control a CNC machine as they guide it through a machining maze, learning how computer-controlled manufacturing equipment is used to create accurate and repeatable parts.
This hands-on demonstration introduces students to machining, automation, and engineering design in an engaging competition format. Participants will work to complete the maze as quickly and accurately as possible, with the fastest time of the day earning the top spot.
Explore how the body stores and copies information by building K'NEX models of DNA replication and transcription. Participants will learn how engineers and scientists use biology, chemistry, and design thinking to better understand living systems and develop technologies that support human health.
Students will explore how plastic parts are made by using an injection molding machine to create a take-home souvenir. This walk-up activity introduces participants to a common manufacturing process used to produce many everyday products, from small components to consumer goods.
Through this hands-on experience, students will learn how material, heat, pressure, and mold design work together to form a finished part. Each participant will leave with a souvenir they helped create while gaining a better understanding of manufacturing, materials, and engineering design.
The Pedal Kart Drunk-Vision Challenge is a “learn with fun” activity that allows participants to experience, in a safe and controlled environment, how alcohol impairment can affect driving ability.
A small driving course is created using traffic cones and barrels to simulate a roadway or obstacle path. Participants first drive the pedal kart through the course without wearing the goggles so they can understand the normal level of control, steering, judgment, and coordination required to complete the course safely.
After completing the first round, participants repeat the same course while wearing drunk-vision goggles. These goggles simulate the visual distortion, delayed reaction, poor depth perception, and reduced coordination that can occur when a person is under the influence of alcohol.
By comparing their performance with and without the goggles, participants can directly observe how impaired vision and slower judgment make even a simple driving task more difficult. This activity helps create awareness about the dangers of drunk driving in an engaging, memorable, and hands-on way.
Participants will explore how autonomous vehicles use robotic sensing to detect pedestrians and respond safely. Using Cubelets, students will learn the difference between sensing and acting as they build and test a small automated vehicle designed to identify a pedestrian and stop before contact.
This hands-on activity introduces students to the engineering behind autonomous vehicle safety, including sensors, movement, design decisions, and problem-solving. Along the way, participants will test how different Cubelet components work together and consider how engineers improve vehicle designs to make interactions with pedestrians safer.
Discover how electricity moves through everyday devices. Using Snap Circuits, participants will build simple working circuits, test switches and lights, and learn how engineers troubleshoot systems when something does not work as expected. This activity introduces the basics of electrical pathways, power, and problem-solving in a hands-on way.
Explore levers, gears, wheels, axles, pulleys, and other simple machines through hands-on models. Participants will test how small design changes can make work easier and discover how simple machines are used in everything from bicycles and elevators to robots and construction equipment.
Test your transportation knowledge in this fast-paced, Jeopardy-style game! Participants can walk up at any time to answer fun and challenging questions about roads, traffic, safety, engineering, and how people and goods move. Play individually or in small groups, choose from different categories, and earn points as you go. This interactive activity offers a fun way to learn about transportation systems while competing for bragging rights (and small prizes!).
Demonstrations
These activities are free and open to the public. However, we are asking everyone to register to attend eDay, so we can ensure we are able to accommodate all attendees.
The Biomedical Sensors and Systems Lab develops engineering technologies designed to improve how health information is collected, analyzed, and used. Researchers in this lab work on intelligent bio-integrated systems, including advanced sensors, custom electronic circuits, and computational tools that help measure and interpret signals from the human body.
During this tour, teachers and students will learn how engineering, biology, and artificial intelligence can work together to support more proactive and personalized healthcare. The lab’s research includes technologies that may help identify early signs of disease, model patient health, and guide future medical decision-making.
Experience real-time heat transfer with the Carlton Lab! Students will explore thermal imaging technology through three guided, interactive stations:
1. Thermal Mapping: Scanning the environment for hot and cold spots.
2. Friction and Heat: Measuring temperature changes from kinetic energy.
3. Insulation Station: Visualizing the protective effects of winter gear.
Presented by the Center for Applied Earth Science and Engineering Research, this demonstration will show how engineers and researchers study the movement of water through soil using runoff and infiltration models. Students will observe how soil moisture equipment is used to measure and understand how water is absorbed, stored, and moves across different surfaces.
Participants will learn why soil moisture data is important for agriculture, environmental monitoring, stormwater management, and infrastructure planning. This activity highlights how earth science and engineering tools help researchers better understand natural systems and support decisions related to water, land, and the environment.
How do engineers measure things that are too small for a normal microscope to see? Join the Ocularscience Lab this Fall for a hands-on adventure into the world of light!
In this interactive demonstration, students will explore Interferometry—a clever technique where we split a single beam of light to create the ultimate high-tech ruler. From playing with lasers to using advanced medical scanners, students will discover how engineers manipulate light to look inside the human body and help doctors save people's sight.
What You’ll Experience:
Station 1: The Magic Laser Ruler (The Michelson Demo)
What happens when light waves crash into each other like ripples in a swimming pool? They create beautiful patterns of bright and dark stripes called "fringes."
- Be the Scientist: Students will test the extreme sensitivity of our laser setup. Watch the light pattern instantly dance and shift just by gently blowing across the beam or lightly tapping the table!
- The Big Idea: See how engineers use these shifting patterns to detect movements a thousand times smaller than a single strand of hair.
Station 2: The Light Ultrasound (Spectral Domain OCT)
Have you ever wanted to see inside something without cutting it open? We will demonstrate a cutting-edge lab scanner called an OCT. It works similarly to a medical ultrasound, but uses safe light waves instead of sound.
- Why not just time the echo? Sound echoes are slow enough for computers to clock. But light travels so incredibly fast that an echo from a microscopic tissue layer returns in less than a trillionth of a second! No physical sensor—electronic or biological—can sample fast enough to measure this echo time directly.
- The Workaround: Instead of trying to build an impossibly fast digital stopwatch, interferometry lets the light waves systematically interact and decode themselves into a visual pattern that standard camera sensors can easily capture.
- Live Scanning: Watch the scanner peer beneath the surface of everyday objects in real-time to reveal hidden layers. Come find out how the physics you learn in school is being used right here to see inside the eyes and protect human health!
Note for Parents & Teachers: All demonstrations are fully interactive and use low-power Class II lasers standard for classroom safety.
Laboratory Tours
These activities are free and open to the public. However, we are asking everyone to register to attend eDay, so we can ensure we are able to accommodate all attendees.
Explore the Autonomous & Complex Systems Laboratory, where researchers design, analyze, and control the next generation of intelligent systems. This lab focuses on autonomous ground and aerial vehicles, multi-agent systems, cyber-physical networks, and robots that safely interact with people.
During the tour, visitors will learn how tools from control theory, optimization, graph theory, and machine learning are used to make complex systems more reliable, adaptive, and safe. The demonstration will feature a robotic arm performing autonomous tasks using artificial intelligence and advanced control systems, offering a hands-on look at how engineering research is shaping the future of robotics and autonomy.
Join us for an interactive tour of our Biomaterials Lab, where biology meets engineering to solve some of medicine’s biggest challenges and heal the human body from the inside out. You will discover the fascinating world of biocompatibility and see firsthand how we engineer metals, polymers, and ceramics to coexist seamlessly with living tissue. Get a close-up look at how next-generation orthopedic, cardiovascular, and dental implants are designed and fabricated to transform patient lives.
Join us for an interactive tour of Dr. Bowlin’s Biomaterial and Regenerative Tissue Engineering Lab, where students will be introduced to how artificial blood vessels are created and why this work is important. During the tour, students will learn how we test the strength of these templates while designing them to be biodegradable and to avoid being attacked by the immune system.
Students will also have the opportunity to see demonstrations of how the templates are made, view microscope images, and explore colorful imaging of living cells.