Kids day at work

Yesterday was take your kids to work day.  The group I work with teaches Six Sigma.  As I am the coordinator for my group's offerings, I was stuck there for the duration.  Therefore, the only pics I have are from my group's presentations.

Here is one of the administrative assistants in the building trying out a Statapult.  It's some kind of statistical catapult.  Don't ask me to explain it, the guy in the photo, however, is an expert in these matters.

This is what the kids are aiming at.  The goal is to knock the ogre from the castle and save the villagers.  It's lame but it works.  I brought a different Shrek ogre in for this year but the person running the activity liked this one better because it didn't fall over as easy as the other one which meant he didn't have to reset it as often.

We have several Statapults that are free standing and the kids get to position and aim them to try and knock out the ogre.  Then we have one Super Statapult and is designed and set up to always hit the target with a one-touch release mechanism.  The aim of Six Sigma is to reduce your defects so you continually produce a defective-free product.

The other activity we ran is a statistical activity involving M&Ms.  This is a big draw, too.  First you get to pick plain or peanut M&Ms.  We decided that next year we're going to ask the kids why they chose the one that they did.  More kids went for plain than for peanut.  One girl said that the plain ones were less crunchy.  One person said that he chose the plain because he is allergic to almonds and the peanut and almond M&Ms are produced in the same building.  Therefore, if he were to eat a peanut M&M he would have an allergic reaction.

So, first you sort your M&Ms by color and count them.  Then you plot your numbers into a spreadsheet table already set up on the computer.  The formula will then tell you if you have an average bag of M&Ms or a defective bag of M&Ms.  We did have a few defective bags.  One girl had a bag that was mostly blue M&Ms.  Even though it was considered to be a defective bag, she still wanted to eat them.

We also raffle off a maglite flashlight.  Not every kid who comes to our activities fills out a raffle form.  Yesterday we had 149 kids fill out forms.  Supposedly there were 600 kids registered to attend the event at my office campus.

It was a long day - noisy and hectic.  It's always so nice and quiet when they all go home.