Fifty-six students and teachers from four Livermore and Tracy middle schools visited Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on April 24, for Dream Day 2026, an event centered on hands-on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities.

Open to sixth through eighth grade students, many of whom are part of their school’s Coding with LLNL after-school clubs, Dream Day was established in 2024 by co-founders and LLNL software developers Paige Jones and Mariah Martinez to showcase careers at the Lab in fun, engaging ways and ultimately help younger students imagine a future at LLNL or in STEM fields.

Hosted at the University of California-Livermore Collaboration Center and Livermore Valley Open Campus, Dream Day 2026 featured interactive activities that small groups rotated through, such as AI training, light-up helicopter building, exploring the Discovery Center, a codebreaking session, and an Inspire Me Design workshop where students practiced coding and built basic websites.

“The best part of Dream Day is seeing the excitement on students’ faces when they complete an activity and realize what they are capable of,” says Paige. “Whether they crack the cipher, create their first JavaScript button that fills the screen with sparkles, or finally see their LED helicopter light up, there is a real sense of pride and accomplishment in that moment. You see them begin to understand that a future in STEM is not only possible, but truly within reach.”

Mariah agrees: “Every Dream Day is special because it gives us the opportunity to connect with students, share new ideas, and hopefully inspire them to explore interests they may not have considered before. What made this year stand out was a new hands-on activity focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning. What I really loved about it was that we were able to take topics that can feel very complex and make them approachable and engaging for middle school students. We also included a conversation about ethics, which made the activity even more meaningful because it gave students the chance to think about AI not just as something exciting and new, but also as something that comes with important questions about bias, data privacy, and responsibility.”

To help students understand how AI works, LLNL session leaders guided the guests through a hands-on activity with two parts that modeled how AI systems learn and make predictions. In the first part, they used a word pool to fill in missing words in a sentence, showing how language models make predictions based on patterns. In the second part, they trained a model using a set of preselected images and then tested it to see how well it performed. Importantly, this gave students a chance to observe that a model can make mistakes, especially when it has limited data, and reinforced why the quality and quantity of training data matters.

Two dozen LLNL software developers and technical staff led sessions throughout the day, giving students the chance to interact with professionals working in computing, cybersecurity, and engineering. The event emphasized collaboration and problem-solving, helping students see how STEM connects to real-world careers.

In my experience, Lab employees are genuinely eager to get involved in volunteer opportunities like Dream Day,” said event co-organizer Nikki Finnestead. “After putting out the call on the Science Education Program’s volunteer opportunities page, we ended up with 23 volunteers, all from Computing. This team doesn’t need much convincing when it comes to inspiring the next generation.”

Dream Day 2026 also helps build stronger connections between the Laboratory and its neighbors, expanding awareness of the Lab’s role in the community.

By the end of the day, Dream Day 2026 had reinforced its goal of inspiring students to dream big, explore STEM pathways, and recognize that exciting opportunities exist close to home.

Many students, even those who live right here in Livermore, don’t fully realize what we do at LLNL or the wide range of opportunities a national laboratory can offer,” says Paige. “It’s important for students to see that they can build a career at a place that is doing work unlike anywhere else in the world, pushing the boundaries of science and technology every day. Events like these help students imagine themselves here and inspire the next generation of innovators, problem-solvers, and future Lab employees.”

Sara Barsky, Mattie Pace, Josh Olberg, Karlie Brown, Joanna Albala, Elyssa Bishop, Garren Weiss, Kevin Athey, Nidhi Bhatnagar, Sarah Osborn, Ted Johnson, Denvir Higgins, Bill Beckett, Jeffrey Fairbanks, Vijay Karani, Sue Wolfe, Ulysses Juan, Clayton Jacobs, Kyle Cookerly, Kathaki Varadan, Anand Doraiswamy, Jeff Gellerman, Eric Hall, Brent Deaver, Andrew Klino, Vinod Gopalan, Verinder Rana, and Samantha Kaul also provided support at the event.

Participating schools were Christensen, East, and Mendenhall from Livermore, and North from Tracy.

The event was co-sponsored by Computing and LLNL’s Science Education Program. The event organizers also extended a special thank you to Garren Weiss and the University of California-Livermore Collaboration Center.

—Deanna Willis