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10:00am - 5:00pm There’s always more to discover!
Mentorship and curiosity instinctively go hand-in-hand. Through a new partnership between Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern Nevada and The Discovery, young people and their mentors are exploring science together in a place where questions are encouraged, and experimentation is part of the fun.
The partnership creates regular opportunities for Bigs and Littles to learn side by side by providing free museum admission for all Bigs and Littles any day the museum is open to the public. Additionally, The Discovery hosts quarterly STEM Nights for Big Brothers Big Sisters participants, offering hands-on activities designed to spark curiosity and strengthen connections between mentors and youth. These collaborative efforts reflect The Discovery’s mission to inspire by being the place to experience science.
Recently, many of those matches gathered at the museum for The Discovery Spy Academy, one of the program’s STEM Night experiences. As the evening began, forty-four participants spread across the museum floor, turning the galleries into a workshop of experiments, puzzles, and covert engineering challenges.
Agents began their spy training with Operation Safe Landing, a hands-on mission exploring physics, engineering design, and materials science. Big and Littles worked together to design a proactive system that allowed “classified cargo” to withstand a high-impact drop. Next came Codebreaker Challenge, in which the agents programed VEX coding robots to retrieve classified files and deliver secret messages all while evading capture. Bigs and Littles worked together to write and debug code, learning how patience and teamwork inform technology.
The final mission took place in the “Gadget Lab,” where agents designed, built, and tested their own covert getaway vehicles. Using simple materials, Bigs and Littles explored how wheel size, axle alignment, and friction affect speed, distance, and stability. Then they tested their creations, making tweaks to improve performance – just like engineers in the field.
The partnership between Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern Nevada and The Discovery reflects a shared belief that mentorship and curiosity grow stronger together. When Bigs and Littles explore science side by side, discovery becomes a profound shared experience.
Sometimes the mission is about science. Sometimes it is about teamwork. And occasionally, both lead to a moment of discovery.