Tech Social
Part TED talk, part tech show-and-tell, part social hour, and all fun, Tech Social is a Piedmont community event for K-12 students and their parents.
Once a month on first Fridays during the school year, Piedmont Tech Social is organized around a monthly theme and includes social time, pizza dinner, a short TEDx-like talk, and self-organizing pods with tech topics such as Minecraft, board games, wearables, and any other topics you would like to share!
2022-2023
May 5 - Rocket Launcher!
Join us to at our next Tech Social to hear about Chris May’s adventures launching barely-fits-inside-a-shipping-container rockets, with a particular focus on the physics behind a rocket that took off sideways! (That's not a joke - it actually did take off and drift sideways).
Chris May is a mentor for FRC Team 8033 and a mechanical engineer at Electric Hydrogen, which designs and builds industrial-scale electrolysis systems to produce green hydrogen for hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as agriculture and steel production. Prior to Electric Hydrogen, he worked at Astra to launch rockets to orbit and designed hardware that is still in space. Farther back, he was on FRC Team 100 (and yes, wore those Dr. Seuss-style orange-and-black hats!).
Buy tickets in advance to enjoy pizza, Chris’s presentation, and some hands-on robotics with FRC Team 8033.
November 18 - Rivian!
Join us for pizza dinner and a guest STEAM speaker from the community, Mojan Sohi, to share her career perspective and bring a Rivian for show-and-tell.
Mojan Sohi is a Materials Engineer by training and has applied her materials knowledge in industries such as utility, automotive and consumer electronics as a Failure Analysis Engineer and as a Reliability Engineer. Mojan currently works as a Reliability manager at Rivian, working on the mechanical systems of Rivian's vehicles.
2021-2022
March 11 - Autonomous Cars & Boats
Join us for pizza dinner and a guest STEAM speaker from the community, Andrew Schultz, to share his career perspective on Autonomous Cars & Boats.
Andrew Schultz is CTO of Saildrone and a hardware and software engineering leader with a background in aerial and ground mapping and self-driving cars. Prior to Saildrone, he co-founded 510 Systems, which was acquired by Google to kick-start its self-driving car program Waymo. He then spent eight years at Google/Waymo, eventually leading self-driving systemdevelopment. He holds a MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and BSE in Computer Engineering from University of Michigan.
January 14 - Virtual Tech Social
We will have a guest STEAM speaker from the community John Welch on Gaming. The Piedmont Pioneers -- one of our Piedmont Middle School FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics teams -- will host gaming rooms after the speaker.
