Have you ever wondered if you can feed your pet fish (safely) with a catapult? How to tell time without a clock? Why bridges don’t collapse? How to draw an accurately-engineered spaceship ready for take-off?

Award-winning children’s authors Ruth Spiro, Bruce Goldstone, Rachel Dougherty, and Brian Floca read from their beloved books and lead hands-on demonstrations in catapult making, sundial construction, the magic of physics, and scientific drawing. Stick around afterward to pick up signed copies of their books.

This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP not required, but encouraged.

SCIENCE AND STORYTIME SCHEDULE:
11:00 AM — Brian Floca, Moonshot: The Fight of Apollo 11
Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 space mission with Caldecott Medal winner Brian Floca and learn about scientific illustration. Pick up a pencil and practice your science and art skills by drawing the space shuttle.

12:00 PM — Bruce Goldstone, Super Summer
With summer right around the corner, learn how to build sundials to tell time using only the sun. Author Bruce Goldstone leads an interactive storytime session to explore the mystery of the seasons.

1:30 PM — Ruth Spiro, Made by Maxine
Maxine uses the scientific method to build just about everything, in Ruth Spiro’s new book. Make a catapult to safely shoot food into a fishbowl and learn the physics behind these flipping feeders that Maxine, and you, construct.

2:30 PM — Rachel Dougherty, Secret Engineer: How Emily Roebling Built the Brooklyn Bridge
Discover Emily Roebling, the woman behind the success of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and then put on your engineering hat to experiment with tension, weights, and springs.

3:30 PM — Lily Xu, A.I. is for Animals
How is artificial intelligence helping protect the world’s most endangered animals? In a new short film by the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, meet the researchers who are using cutting edge AI in 600 global parks to defeat armed poachers. Conduct interactive experiments with USC researcher Lily Xu to understand just how these supercomputer brains work.