Dream Day inspires Livermore students to explore STEM careers

More than 50 students from five Livermore middle schools visited Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) on April 18 for Dream Day, an event filled with hands-on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) activities.

Open to all Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District (LVJUSD) sixth-eighth graders, Dream Day was designed to spark students’ curiosity and help them envision a future in which their interests can lead to exciting, meaningful careers. A similar Dream Day for Tracy students was held on March 21.

For many students, such as Hamsika Sarathy, a sixth-grader from Christensen Middle School, the event was a memorable one. “It’s been super fun,” Sarathy said. “It’s definitely a new experience, and I’m learning a lot.”

Held at the University of California-Livermore Collaboration Center and Livermore Valley Open Campus, Dream Day featured several interactive activities including a light-up helicopter building exercise, a scavenger hunt at the Discovery Center, a cybersecurity and codebreaking session and an “Inspire Me Design” workshop, where students practiced coding and building basic websites.

Clayton Jacobs, a software developer at LLNL, led the web design workshop, and emphasized the importance of introducing coding at an early age.

“It’s fun to see their excitement and awe,” Jacobs said. “In school, math and science classes don’t really talk about programming, but I think that foundation is good for the students to see there’s this light at the end of the tunnel to do something exciting.”

One of the day’s activities was the “Sweet Locks” cryptography challenge, co-led by Katrina Herweg, a cybersecurity expert at LLNL. Students were given a cipher and tasked with cracking a code to open a lockbox containing candy, introducing them to the basics of data protection and encryption. Herweg, who grew up in Livermore and benefited from early exposure to STEM in school, reflected on the value of outreach initiatives like Dream Day in shaping future careers.

“If it weren’t for these opportunities that the Laboratory provided, I wouldn’t be here today,” she said. “It's so fundamental — having these programs strengthens our pipeline, our relationship with the community and makes the Lab a better place. And we all love volunteering and interacting with the kids just because we love what we do, and we love sharing it.”

For many of the students, Dream Day helped them understand what the Lab does and connect their personal interests with real-world applications. Brandon Quizon, a student at Joe Michell K-8, aspires to be an aerospace engineer and enjoyed the helicopter-building activity the most.

"That was my favorite because I got to unleash my creativity,” he said. “Dream Day is really fun — it’s a great opportunity to learn about STEM, and I think everyone should do it. It’s awesome.”

New to this edition of Dream Day was a Harry Potter-themed, Jeopardy-style quiz competition called “Tech Wizard Trivia,” designed to reinforce STEM and computer programming concepts. Lab software developers Makena Haroldson Briceno and Brent Deaver ran the challenge. Both scientists visit local schools throughout the year to teach coding and robotics to students, including some who attended Dream Day.

Briceno said when she was a student, she didn’t know about STEM career paths until high school. “I felt like I was behind,” Briceno explained. “It was cool to have the students be able to see the Lab and that they have this opportunity to learn about software development and programming.”

Hannah Borjon, a science and STEM teacher at Joe Michell, credited Dream Day with helping to expand the partnership between Livermore schools and the Lab.

“I hope my students learn that they have a future in this if they want it, and it’s not something that’s unattainable,” Borjon said. “They’re capable of coding a website, and as they keep practicing, and keep growing in their academics, it’s not that far off being reality.”

For Lab Computing Workforce Manager Marisol Gamboa, who grew up in a small New Mexico town and didn’t get exposed to computers until later in life, Dream Day demonstrated the value of providing local students with the possibilities in their own backyard.

“The best thing we can do for our communities is to encourage kids and give them a preview of the fact that people like them work at these places,” Gamboa said. “Their interactions with volunteers from across Computing and the Lab give them the opportunity to see the humans at the workplace.”

Gamboa’s goal to foster familiarity with local students was mirrored by Bronwyn Blair, an eighth-grade student at Junction Avenue TK-8 School, who attended Dream Day last year and said the Lab now feels “like home” to her.

“This is a really big Lab, and it's a really important place. But it's kind of cool that the [the scientists] are just normal people that you can talk and be friends with, and they're all super friendly and funny," Blair said. “It makes me feel comfortable over here, and it feels like it's a little more accessible, like you could see a pathway here."

In addition to the interactive activities, the students had the opportunity to listen to Annie Kritcher, a nuclear engineer and physicist at LLNL, who spoke about fusion and the groundbreaking ignition experiment conducted at the National Ignition Facility in 2022. Kritcher’s talk sparked even more interest about the Lab’s cutting-edge work, allowing students to ask questions about fusion energy.

By the end of the day, it was clear Dream Day had succeeded in its objectives. Shelene Mah, a teacher and technology specialist on special assignment for LVJUSD, explained why Dream Day was important in providing Livermore students with a glimpse of possible careers.

“Dream Day is offering our kids some hands-on experience and what it's like to be in the computer science world and engineering, and we love the idea of our own students coming to work for the Lab one day, and so we’re hoping to inspire them,” Mah said. “Not every subject is interesting when you're in school, but when you can find a passion, then you can see what it could translate to.”

Dream Day co-founders and Lab software developers Mariah Martinez and Paige Jones expressed their enthusiasm for the growth of the event and were pleased by the students’ response to changes designed to make the activities more interactive.

“We were able to grow Dream Day to accommodate a larger number of students, and, using responses from the last event, we were able to revamp a lot of our labs,” Martinez said. “We've gotten a lot of good responses from both students and our volunteers, so we're really excited to continue doing this event yearly. We hope that participating in Dream Day will inspire students to dream big and consider exploring a future career in a computer science-related field or another area of STEM.”

Jones also reflected on Dream Day’s expanding influence. “Seeing everybody here this morning, [Martinez and I] had a moment together, and we looked around and said, ‘wow, our dream really is coming true,’” Jones said. “We envisioned the event growing and opening it up to all middle school students and making the presence of the lab known and making this day really fun.”