Our company traded spreadsheets for safety goggles, sending a squad of coworkers (me included) to the Boys & Girls Club Science Fair. Our booth’s mission: show kids how generative AI works by letting them design original extraterrestrials with ChatGPT—and give them a souvenir to prove it.
How we ran the station
Age Group | Prompt Style | Typical Results |
|---|---|---|
6 – 10 (Junior Astronauts) | Fill-in-the-blank “Mad-Lib” prompts (“Create a ___-colored alien shaped like a ___…”) | Cotton-candy clouds with pogo-stick legs, gummy-bear diplomats who squeak |
11 – 14 (Galactic Engineers) | Write-your-own prompt after a quick primer on “prompt engineering” | Bioluminescent ice-planet sentinels, 3-D game-trailer creatures with lore |
The print-and-take magic
The real sparkle came after the AI revealed each alien:
Instant keepsake – A teammate at our “mini print shop” hit Print, and a photo printer spat out a glossy postcard of the creature.
Repeat customers – Some kids loved it so much they queued up two, three, even four times, tweaking prompts to fill an entire intergalactic trading-card set.
Looking ahead
Our partnership with the Boys & Girls Club is an ongoing commitment, and events like this remind us why. Watching kids light up as their ideas leap from prompt to printout—and knowing they’ll take those creations home—reinforces the power of hands-on STEAM experiences. We can’t wait to return for the next science fair (or any excuse, really) and keep exploring the universe of AI together.
