Engineering Open House, the signature outreach event of the University of Illinois, held its 2016 edition under the theme ‘The STEM of Innovation.’ Thousands of local schools and families came over to see some of the things done at this university that are pushing the boundaries of innovation.
ITE participated in the event as well. Our most popular exhibit remained the Perception Reaction Time (PRT) instrument, and we had kids (and adults) competing with each other for the fastest reaction time. The record this year was 0.12 seconds. Aside from that, we had a lot of selfies with the full-scale traffic light as well.
In addition to those, we had a live visual and audio feed of O’Hare International Airport’s ATC running, and also showed an old electro-mechanical traffic controller. Both of these were highly appreciated and we always had large crowds.