Last week I attended a science fair in Chicago called Labfest. Hosted by science Chicago, Labfest is a series of science day fairs happening all summer and is designed to promote science learning for Chicago’s local children and their families.

Champions Science Adventures has gotten in on the fun and is hosting a “Bubbleology” Booth to help people discover the fun in science.  

Young or old, bubbles seem to capture our imagination and we quickly had a crowd of budding scientists gathered to try their hand at making a unique bubble creation. Bubbles are not only a lot of fun, but they are bursting with science. From surface tension to thin film interference, bubbles provide a great platform for us to talk about everyday science all around us.

As the children explored their bubble making abilities, our trained staff provided key questions and challenges designed to promote critical thinking and encourage experimental play. Can you make a square bubble? How many colors swirl on a bubbles surface? Can you predict when a bubble will pop? What is the best soap to use for a long lasting bubble? Stations were hands-on which made it easy for the visitors to test their ideas and discover answers for themselves.

Both our staff scientists and the scientists in training had a great deal of fun. By using the attraction of bubbles to spark the natural curiosity of our visitors, we where able to show that science is fun, important, and relevant. All you need are some simple questions and a natural curiosity to succeed in “Bubbleology”. I left knowing a couple of thousand people who wound never look at soap and water the same way again. So, if you are going to be in Chicago in the month of August come and find our bubble experts at Labfest.

Links:  Labfest    

Science Chicago

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”

Gases are made of highly excited molecules. To teach this you can show students the Ideal Gas Law and the linear relationship between pressure, volume, and temperature.

pV =nRT 

You can tell them that the air molecules around us are racing at over a 1000mph.  The result is always the same. Their faces glaze over, we all swim through an ocean of gas every day and I guess a little familiarity breeds contempt. Therefore you need an experiment that takes gases from the ordinary to extraordinary.

Last week, I set about bringing the power of gases to life for the staff here at our Littleton office. What is the point of having a “science wiz” on staff if you do not get to see something cool once in a while?

So after roping off a large portion of our parking lot and with everything checked for safety, I took a gas that had been super-cooled into a liquid and poured it into a bottle and sealed it. I then quickly took my bottle and dropped it into a trash can for containment. Then we waited!

The molecules of the super-cooled gas were heated by the outside temperature and began speeding up as they went from minus 320 F to about 70 F.  As they heated up they gained energy and quickly started to expand.  The bottle they were sealed in stopped the expansion so the gas molecules started to push on the walls, rapidly increasing the pressure inside the bottle. At somewhere around 100 pounds per square inch, the bottle failed and the gas molecules rushed out at around 1000-mph. This blew away both my trash can and my audience. First there was the huge shockwave boom. It was the kind of noise that you feel in your chest rather than in your ear. Then with car alarms blaring we witnessed pieces of trash can falling back to Earth.

One member of my audience told me it was the coolest thing she had seen at work in 25 years. And I knew that everyone had learned a little something about the power of gases and would not be taken them for granted anytime soon.  

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”

Science has been a passion of mine ever science High School.  It is a passion that has served me well in another of my interests—cooking. There are very strong links between cooking and science; both involve measuring, testing, and experimentation.  The art of cooking is the management of physical and chemical reactions with a healthy dose of experimentation thrown in.  We have all found ourselves in the situation where we are missing that one ingredient needed to complete a recipe and have then decided to make a substitution, creating our own mini-experiment in the process.

Television Chief Alton Brown leveraged this kitchen science connection when he presented recipes in a new way on his extremely education television show.  Recently, I discovered that the science of cooking has been taken to a whole new level when I read a book called “What Einstein Told His Cook,” by Robert Wolke.  As both a professor of chemistry and a keen cook, Robert dives into the science of the kitchen with gusto.  From whether you should add salt or oil to boiling pasta water to the latest scientific research on juicing limes, he blends the science of cooking with funny anecdotes and explains concepts in easy-to-understand terms.  A lot of what we do in the kitchen is learned through experience, but as Robert shows it is all founded in really interesting science.

I often recommend cooking as an educational activity when parents ask me how to engage their children in science at home.  Getting the children involved in the process of cooking is a perfect way to encourage their natural curiosity while also helping them develop experimental technique.  Food after all, is very motivational.  From measuring a cup of sugar to melting chocolate, kitchen chemistry is a great way to introduce children to and promote the process of experimentation.  Do not underestimate the educational power of allowing a young child to dissolve sugar and salt in separate glasses of water and then having them taste it.  Careful measuring, watching batter turn into cake, or adding lemon juice to avocadoes to stop them from browning, this is all great science opportunities that can be a springboard to further learning.  Best of all, this is science that you can eat.

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”

Next month our 2009 Summer Camp program starts. This month, we sent over 1200 pages of curriculum to print. Our ideas from the last twelve months have finally coalesced into lesson plans and experiments. With shiny new curriculum in front of me, it’s always a good time to pause and consider our program goals.  If I were forced to distill our curriculum into just one word, that word would be FUN!

My eighteen years of teaching has taught me that learning can and should be fun! Too often learning can be considered as a chore, like eating green leafy vegetables; it is something you do for the benefits, but not your first choice. Intuitively, we all know that you get better results when learning is made fun. Think about the last time you got swept away in a program on the Discovery Channel or innocently sat down at a computer and Googled a topic, only to look up and discover an hour has flashed by.  You know that when a topic is fun, it drives your interest, and guess what?  It no longer feels like learning.

To make learning fun you need two elements, relevance and play. We are all natural learners. It is after all how we progress from an infant to an adult. It is important to capitalize upon this natural curiosity by making the topic relevant and interesting. For play students should be empowered to be able to direct their own learning through games, creativity, or experiments. Students will not readily learn about electricity just because it will be on a test. They can, however, be engaged by the fact that electricity is secretly powering their video games and be motivated to experiment and build a flashlight they can use to secretly read comics under their blankets.

At Champions Science Adventures, fun is at the core of all our lessons. If we make the process of learning science fun, we then make science itself fun and hopefully more appealing to our students.

Andy Allen

“The Science Wiz”

Welcome! My name is Andy Allan and I oversee the creation of the Champions Science Adventures program. Our enrichment program believes the best way to learn science is though hands-on discovery, actually doing science.

Recently, I got to do some very cool hands-on science for television. I was interviewed by fourteen morning news shows concerning the importance of science education and how our program makes science learning interesting and fun. This media blast was part of a series of fun events around the country to kick off Science Adventures Summer Camps. The news programs were located all around the United States, but luckily I only had to make one trip for my interviews. Using the power of satellite technology, I was able to stay in one place and beam my science experiments around the country.

Once in the studio, I was joined by three elementary students who became my science assistants. They helped me demonstrate three experiments and showcase just how motivational and exciting science learning can be. Together we made atomic green-glowing slime, made a cup of water disappear using some science magic, and set in motion an oscillating chemical reaction that swung back-and-forth from bright yellow to blue. These experiments not only got my three assistants excited and engaged, but also grabbed the attention of the news anchors. It is always a lot of fun to teach science, and being on camera with the children doing the experiments was a great way to showcase the fundamentals of how Science Adventures teaches science in its programs around the country. I think we definitely brightened the morning for quite a few people and got both the news anchors and their viewers to think a little more about how the world around them works.

Click here to learn about experiments you can do at home.