WOODSFIELD — The Center of Science and Industry was among the guests at the Monroe County Fair.

On Friday, the organization pulled up its truck and unloaded dozens of practical science stations at the fairgrounds, allowing families and children to experience hands-on applications of scientific principles in the hopes of sparking a greater curiosity about the workings of the world.

The stations included logic puzzles, samples of organisms that live in various bodies of water, stations where children built pyramids and other structures and worked with pendulums and magnets.

Perrin Shepherd, outreach educator with COSI, said he and fellow educators have been making a summer of science for young people.

“One of the things we do is festivals and fairs. We bring science experiments,” he said. “We’ve been going to county fairs all over Ohio this year.”

Shepherd said he hopes these creative and practical ways to demonstrate scientific principles will encourage young people to think about those principles as they apply to their everyday lives.

“We’re trying to show them science is around them all the time. We’re trying to give them some puzzles they can learn from.

They’re challenges. If they read them they’ll get a challenge they have to complete, and during that process figure out why — the reason we’re doing stuff,” he said. “We have logic puzzles. We have magnets, we have roller coasters. A lot of construction. These are all things that are done by scientists and in our everyday life. “When kids say, ‘There’s no way I could ever be an architect,’ well they’re actually being an architect because they’re building the structures they see. … They get to build a roller coaster and understand how the hill is important to the speed of the roller coaster, how to make things go slower, how to make things go faster.”

Other principles include magnetism.

“We use magnets every day,” he said. “We use magnets to move things if we need to move things without physically having to grab it. If you have to move a car, you can use a lever, or you can use a magnetic lift.”

Shepherd added the stations also offer the children a chance to show their inventiveness.

“We want them to get an answer, but also we want them to understand the process to get an answer.

Sometimes their process is different, but they still come up with the correct answer. There’s multiple solutions sometimes,” he said.

Shepherd said he also emphasizes the virtues of patience and persistence, adding that they pay off.

“What you want to encourage is perseverance,” he said, adding that too often people will give up when they do not succeed at the first attempt. “A lot of these are designed so that you keep trying. Maybe you didn’t get it right the first time, but you learned something.”

He commended the fair and the many participants in the stations for their interest in science and learning.

“I see a great number of people here ready to learn science and I’m excited to show them some more. You can see them now — they’re engaged,” he said. “That’s the coolest part: You get to see families engaged in the hands-on activity.”