Field trips at Austin STEM Center

Awe Lab: Bringing STEM to Life in Just Three Hours

Awe Lab. No tours and talking at students here - we are all about hands-on building. Students step into a real makerspace and, in three hours, design, fabricate, and take home a working project they built themselves. Along the way, they work with the same professional-grade tools used in industry—laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines—while learning the science and engineering behind them.

Every ASC field trip blends creativity, problem-solving, and technical skills. Projects are tailored for grade level and aligned to TEKS, with versions for upper elementary, middle, and high school. Students leave with a finished project, a set of skills they’ve just applied, and the confidence that comes from making something real. Teachers leave with classroom-ready resources to extend the learning back at school.

Make & Take: Slide Rule

Students step back in time to build their own working slide rule — the analog computer that powered engineering before digital calculators. Along the way, they learn how logarithmic scales work, explore the history of STEM tools, and practice precision fabrication. Each student leaves with a wooden slide rule and the skills to use it.

Folding Microscope

From flat parts to powerful magnification, students design and build a folding microscope using wood, 3D-printed parts, and a simple lens. They explore how convex lenses bend light, test their microscopes on real specimens, and take home a fully functional tool for scientific discovery.

Folded Metal Automaton

Students transform a flat sheet of aluminum into a moving robot. They cut, fold, and set pivots, then install a small motor and belt drive to bring their automaton to life. Along the way, they explore gear ratios, motion transfer, and the link between volts, amps, and watts — and take home a robot they built from scratch.

Water Bug Robot

Blending electronics, coding, and fabrication, students build a playful “waterbug” robot from the ground up. They wire an Arduino, connect sensors and servos, program it to respond to its environment, and fabricate a custom chassis. The result: a working robot and a hands-on introduction to mechatronics.

Discover Your Potential with Austin STEM Center

The ASC “Secret Sauce” Isn’t Secret: We Share the Recipes

These recipes move students and teachers past abstract knowledge into the confidence to take things apart, understand them, and make them work again.

Our core ingredient? Agency.

That’s the feeling you get when you don’t just know how a motor works — you’ve taken it apart, reassembled it, and made it run. Agency is knowing you have the skills to change the world around you.

(A note about the links below. Most of these map to MakerAwaker.com, Ken Hawthorn's teaching and PD blog. Many of the lesson cores for ASC field trips will be rooted in these lessons and built upon them. ASC will fully and freely publish more detailed lesson plans as we bring these in and fully develop them to serve the community).

Simple Lessons, Powerful Outcomes

We build Agency with simple, low-cost, high-impact lessons anyone can run duplicate once they have gone through the lesson themselves.

Example Recipe #1: A Conversation with a Paperclip

Ingredients: One pair of pliers + one Acco Jumbo paperclip.
The Lesson: Straighten, bend, and coil the wire. Feel tension, compression, and Modulus of elasticity “springiness” in your hands. Learn to listen to materials.
Why It Works: Turns an abstract textbook concept into a real, physical experience — for less than a penny.

Example Recipe #2: Start with Simple Hand Tools

Ingredient: A Crop-A-Dile, a hand tool from the scrapbooking world.
The Lesson: Punch perfect holes in craft sticks, plastic, or sheet metal. Set eyelets for strong pivots and joints.
Why It Works: Safe, affordable, and precise — lets an entire class build complex moving structures at the same time.

Example Recipe #3: Servo Take Apart
Ingredients: A low-cost servo motor + a microcontroller (Arduino).
The Lesson: Disassemble the servo and run it while its parts are visible. Manually turn the position sensor and feel the motor fight to follow the code. Turn the servo into an imput device.
Why It Works: Makes the abstract concept of a feedback loop unforgettable.

Systems Thinking at ASC: Chassis, Hardware, Software

Once you start making, you see the pattern:

Chassis: The physical structure (car frame, chicken skeleton).
Hardware: The working components (engine/muscles, electronics/organs).
Software: The instructions (computer code, DNA).

With Agency, any system — car, chicken, or robot — becomes approachable. You can analyze it, understand it, and change it.

The ASC Difference: Higher-Resolution Learning

We don’t just explain how something works — we add the extra detail that makes you see it in high definition. Example: Bats use echolocation. A basic STEM class might build a sonar device to demonstrate this.

An Example of our extra layer: You might know bats use echolocation (sonar) to hunt. You might even have built an ultrasonic ruler with an Arduino, but did you know that bats actually change pitch while hunting — low pitch for long-distance scanning, high pitch for close-in precision? That’s the kind of elegant detail that deepens understanding and wonder, that adds depth and complexity without additional prior knowledge needed.

Outcomes for Teachers and Students

For Teachers:

Design hands-on lessons using simple, affordable materials.
Gain confidence to lead open-ended engineering challenges.
Leave with a toolkit of “powerful combinations” of tools and materials.

For Students:

Develop real Agency — the ability to build, modify, and repair their world.
See failure as useful data and learn to push tools to their limits.
Gain deep, intuitive knowledge — feel torque, fight a feedback loop.

Experience It for Yourself

Every ASC field trip, workshop, and open-published lesson is designed to be shared and replicated. Whether you’re a teacher, maker, or student, you can take our recipes and run them anywhere.

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