Where do you take 37 students who are attached to their cell phones? To Nokia-Bell Laboratories where so much of what makes a cell phone work was invented!

Liberty Science Center, in partnership with the Jersey City Public Schools and with funding from the NJ Department of Education, has been conducting a year-long after-school STEM program at the Franklin L. Williams School (MS7) and the Joseph H. Brensinger School (PS17). Among various projects during the year, students have programmed small robots with sensors, built cameras, investigated sound, and learned simple coding.

On June 1, the students were given tours of the Nokia-Bell Labs research facilities in Murray Hill, NJ, and saw leading edge research in autonomous vehicles, lensless cameras, an anechoic chamber (that absorbs 99.98% of all sound), and visual displays of the relationship between data found with advanced search algorithms. Bell Labs “Archivist” Edward Eckert reviewed the 150 years of Bell Labs inventions — everything from the first telephone networks to satellites to sound for motion pictures to C++ and UNIX to transistors and lasers. It is remarkable how much of the technology we take for granted came from research at Bell Labs.

The students ended the day with a scavenger hunt in the LSC-designed Technology Showcase, which is open to the public and well worth a visit. The students saw a replica of the first telephone, the first video phone, the first transistor, the Lab’s eight Nobel Prizes, not to mention their Oscar and Grammy Awards.

It was quite appropriate that the group posed for a photo under the statue of Claude Shannon (1916-2001), whose creation of information theory underlies all electronic communications by the telephone system, the satellite system, and the internet.

STEM blog by Harold Clark, PhD. Dr. Clark is the Director of STEM Educators and Programs here at Liberty Science Center.