This post done by our very own Papa (as he was the one who took the kids)
We got word, through the library, that there was some sort of science and engineering fair at a semi-local high school, and, to put the final nails in our kids' little nerd coffins, we decided to take them. Now, when I heard about this, I was expecting a classroom, maybe two, with a dozen or so tables, each having two or three high school kids demonstrating some sort of little science project. I was completely wrong.
We walked into the building (after a small adventure with parking) and found a couple tables set up. The first had some tuning forks and the insides to a mechanical music box. I was amazed to find that Tristan was able to identify the notes by sound ("that's an E, Papa!"), but I'm not sure why. That boy pushes the limits of what I thought possible for a 5-year-old. And then he blows right past them. Both of the crazies thought the tuning forks were fun. They tried bringing two resonating tuning forks close together, and really enjoyed how the sound amplified differently depending on which tuning forks they used. They also liked hole-punching a small melody on a card and running it through the music box. They were such eager little composers.
The next table had a demo called "travelling water," where they showed how water will run in all sorts of directions along a string, instead of running straight down. The people at the station explained that the water travelled that way because of surface tension, and the kids connected that idea with water running down their arms when they wash their hands. The other part of the demo was a small bucket full of water with a cheesecloth spread over the top. The idea was that the surface tension would clog the holes in the cheesecloth, and the water would stay in the bucket, even when you turned it upside down. It did not work very well, but that might have been more entertaining for everyone, anyway.
Moving on, there was a station with a ramp and some marbles. The guy running the station showed that if you left a marble at the bottom of the ramp and then released one from the top of the ramp, the momentum would transfer and the stationary marble would roll off. The crazies loved this, and experimented with it. They tried putting two marbles at the bottom of the ramp and rolling one down the ramp, and they were really excited when only one marble rolled away at the bottom, because they were so sure that's how it would go. Then they got really clever with it. They lined three marbles up at the bottom of the ramp and let two go, just to see if two marbles would roll off. They loved coming up with different combinations of marbles, and they were so very curious. It's great to give them a chance to explore that.
We saw a solar-powered car, which the kids thought was hilarious. "What a silly car! Look! There's no room for car seats or groceries or anything!" (Lu). The car was an engineering project from Western, and the students that were in charge of that station really just seemed to be concerned with making sure that no one broke their car, which was kind of a shame. But it was nice being able to answer the kids' questions about why the top of the car was so flat, and why it was black, and why it had lots of small black squares on top, as opposed to just a few big ones. They really did dig into all the little details.
One of our next stops was a small medical exhibit. Okay, it wasn't meant to be, but that's what it turned into. There had been some sort of station with glass something-or-other, and a kid had broken some of the glass and sliced his hand pretty deeply. So the small medical exhibit was mostly just a lot of blood and a couple paramedics stitching this kid up.
We made our way into the auxiliary gym, where they had maybe a dozen stations set up. The first one we saw was a station where they had some dollar bills that they were soaking in isopropanol, and then lighting on fire. This one, the kids honestly didn't think was so exciting. They liked watching the fire, but they really didn't care that the bills weren't burning up. They just kind of shrugged and moved on.
Next, they hit up a station that was peopled with Pfizer workers. They showed the kids how to use syringes to push mixtures through silica filters and separate the mixtures into components. It was very cool that they used mixtures of dyes that could separate in familiar ways. They had a purple dye that separated into blue and red, and a green dye that separated into blue and yellow. They even talked about exactly why the components separated in the order they saw (why blue came out first and then yellow, instead of the other way around). We really appreciated how thorough they were.
In the same room was a station with different animals. Now, what a couple turtles, some guinea pigs, and a pair of rabbits had to do with a science fair, I don't understand, but the crazies loved being able to sit and hold bunnies. They took a good amount of time and sat, petting them and snugging them and just soaking it in. They even got in line a second time so that they could hold the second bunny.
The next station had some surgical tools for orthopedics. The kids played around with bone saws and drills, and they put on full surgical gear, which they got a kick out of, but they didn't really linger.
We left the auxiliary gym and wandered into the "time tunnel." This was a fairly isolated hallway that had different cutting-edge technologies from over the last couple hundred years. We're talking washing boards progressing to turn-crank full-barrel washing machines (all you have to do is put in your clothes and some water and soap, then turn this crank for 60-75 minutes), toasters (fill the inside of this with coals and lean your bread against the outside), spinning wheels, ... you name it. The kids were remarkably good at figuring out exactly what each item was (which is funny, because they were better at figuring it out that I was).
Then, we found the gym. Oh. My. Word. The number of stations in that room. Marble runs, remote-control robots, air cannons, the classic angular momentum demos, magnetism, astronomy... There was so much. A couple of the big hits:
The robotics station was very cool. They had a couple robots that could do simple tasks like picking up objects, carrying them from A to B, and putting them down. The kids loved being able to control the robots. They loved racing each other. They loved trying to pick up different boxes. They were great.
They also found a geology station, which I'm glad they were excited about. I've never been particularly excited about geology, and I'd hate to pass that on to them. I don't want to cut off their interest in any given thing just because I never got into it. I'm trying, now, to read up on it a bit more and find some cool stuff to show them. Luckily, I do have some good connections to find some great things to do. It seems there's more to geology than just rocks.
The kids played around with talc (the softest mineral, the one they make baby powder out of), quartz (of course), some igneous rock, and sulfur (stink rock, as the kids called it). They also had a table with two big pieces of rock submerged in water. Each rock had a bicycle pump hooked up to it, and you could pump air through the rock (to demonstrate how some rocks are more porous than others). It really was a fun station.
The last station we found was a simulation of floating trains. It was a couple of tracks with magnets glued to the bottom, and then some flat lego bases with magnets glued to the bottoms of those. There were plenty of other legos on the table, so that the kids could take the bases and make trains out of them. The magnets repelled each other, and the trains levitated off the track, and both of the crazies picked up that there wouldn't be friction and that the trains could just keep going. It was interesting to see how many concepts they could connect, and you could just see their brains working, putting it all together.
We stayed until the event was over, and then headed home. As an added bonus, we actually passed the solar car on the way home. That was kind of weird, seeing it just on the road, but it was a nice way to end the adventure.
GVG
