Bring Your Child to Work Day

On Thursday, my dad picked me up from school at 10:30 to go to Bring Your Child to Work Day at his place of employment, BAE Systems, where he basically makes and tests air plane engines.

BAE is somewhat of a confidential place (since they make engines for the Air Force), so it really was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Also, some of the machines and equipment in BAE are highly sensitive to electricity, so if you merely touch it, it'll collapse. Because of this, only kids age 12 or older were allowed to attend Bring Your Child to Work Day.

We started the day out right by eating free pizza provided by BAE, while watching a presentation about what exactly the company does. After this, we split into 9 groups, and each group went to a different station. Our first station was the 3D printer station, which was absolutely amazing. The leader of the station explained that someone designs an object on a computer, then sends it to the printer, which proceeds to "print" out the object, moving across a block of powder, building the desired object one tiny layer at a time. At the end of the station, the man gave us all a little toy car, which the 3D printer had printed out.

Next, we went to a station in which we could control robots. Robots designed to play soccer. The little, triangular robot had two wheels protruding from the front, which caught the soccer ball. Then, a mallet would swing back and kick the ball. After failing miserably at controlling these robots, the instructors took the controls and humiliated us by easily directing the robots and scoring goals.

We then went to a station where we used an ohm meter to detect the resistance in a small metal wire. The resistances on each of the wires (334.6, 27.8, 6.66) all corresponded with a letter, and when you put all the letters together, they spelled a word (ours was capacitor).

Another fun station was the Lego station, where we used Legos to build an overlarge, pretend circuit board (and we had to produce them quickly, to meet the customers' needs).

My favorite station was the soldering station, in which we actually got to solder tiny pieces onto a real circuit board! It was extremely difficult, and a bit nerve-wracking, since the iron is more than 500 degrees! In the end, I think I became an expert solderer.

Our last station was in the failure analysis section of the gigantic BAE building. When a part fails, it gets sent to failure analysis, where there job is to find the malfunction and correct it. The amazing thing about it was the microscopes. They weren't technically microscopes at all. They were magnetic telescopes, which can magnify images - in 3D - up to 4600 times!

At the end of the day, we assembled in a conference room for the drawings. Everyone put their name in a bag, and if your name was pulled, you won a umbrella, or a CD case, or a BAE Systems lunch box. . . or an iPod Touch. Yes, I had about a 1 in 100 chance to win a iPod Touch, but. . . sorry, I didn't win.

At least I had an awesome time at Bring You Child to Work Day!