MIT’s Sixteenth Annual Friday After Thanksgiving (F.A.T.) will be held November 29, 1PM-4PM at the Rockwell Cage Gymnasium at MIT. This is a STEM event like no other. You can either go to watch or register as a team to build your part of a giant, Rube-Goldberg-like Chain reaction. Each team gets a table on which to build a link in a chain reaction that goes around the gym. Each link is supposed to take from 30 seconds to 2 minutes — and eventually either pass a golf ball to the next link or pull a string.
The event is emceed by Arthur Ganson, artist in residence at MIT and Mechanical genius. At the MIT museum, there is a whole room of his sculptures, and it’s worth a trip just for that.
If you are participating, register ahead of time. It’s best to plan ahead and do most of your construction ahead of time, saving final assembly and tweaking at MIT. Plan to arrive at 11:30AM with your contraption and be prepared to demo it for spectators between 1PM and 3PM. Sometime around 3PM, they’ll set the whole thing off! If you’re just spectating, it’s good arrive by around 1PM, since it gets pretty crowded.
My family has been doing this for the last 4 years, and it’s a blast! Here’s my blog post about the event two years ago: http://baldwisdom.com/black-