Last minute buying at the Palisades Mall
It all began a long time ago, in a huge suburban mall, off the Palisades Parkway...First day David, Shlomo and I got a ride with Shlomo’s bro to camp, and we stopped off at the mall to pick up some supplies. We planned on having some squishy circuits (http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/) around for campers to play around with. Browsing through Radio Shack, we soon realized we didn’t know which voltage batteries and LEDs we wanted. Thank you Apple store around the corner. With our batteries and LED bought, we just needed to make some conductive play dough, and then campers could have fun with parallel circuits, series circuits and short circuits. Before we left the mall we needed to accomplish one more mission. We planned on doing the egg drop competition, and Alex, the PhD student we worked with, had told us to get Chinese store boxes. Asking about at food stores, we started to see a pattern. When we said we were going to run a science workshop at a camp, we got encouraging looks, but when we continued and said we needed boxes to throw tons of eggs off the porch, then...but we did walk off with a bunch of useless McDonalds paper bags and two from the popcorn stand.
The first day of camp
We sat and sat through the infamous orientation day of pep rallies and safety talks, rules and mosh pits. But, then finally, we got to slide down the soap slicked slip n’ slide. I felt the years melting away. If you are that guy who put the soap in the sneakers I left behind, don’t sleep sound, because I will find you. That night, we found out we’d be setting up shop in one of the large conference rooms and that our workshop name was the Mad Science Workshop. Finally, after deciding we’d run the egg drop competition tomorrow, and after go through Shlomo’s costumes, we shut the lights in Room 608, the Mad Scientists sleeping quarters.
Dropping Raw Eggs is Fun...
I have satiated my need to throw raw eggs at hard surfaces. Come to think of it, I never threw an egg, but campers sure did. First, we sprinkled some science about. We began, “NASA has a problem with landing space ships, because they can explode on impact when hitting the earths surface, and to think about the problem, NASA scientists will drop eggs on hard surfaces but devise contraption to prevent them from breaking. The three relevant science principles are slowing the speed of the falling egg, increasing the total time of impact, and distributing the force of impact over the object. Then we wave around the room and tell the campers they can use anything in the science lab to protect their eggs. And we point about our Lab at the cotton balls, gloves, popsicle sticks, parachutes and glue. Glue. The coolest design by, feel free to disagree, David, was simply a bowl filled with glue. How elegant! The surefire ways of protecting ones egg involved blowing up tons of rubber gloves. From all the attempts made, about ⅕ were successful, I think. But some of these attempts include throwing eggs at walls, and frying them with our Lab hot-plate...Anyways, egg-dropping off the hook. Thanks Alex Hansler for suggesting it!
Squishy Circuits and the Plasma Globe
Eggs dropped. We moved on to baking squishy circuits, requesting a funny bunch of ingredients - Flour to Cream of Tartar - from Reuven, the chef. All went well until we one particularly electromagnetic camper came along. With him leading the pack, our mad science workshop earned its stripes. We had a plasma globe on hand, because what’s a lab without a plasma globe on hand...Its cool how you can put you finger anywhere and a tendril of white electricity connect the center of the globe with your finger. Now, what happens if you put a ball of squishy circuit playdough on the globe? It fills with electrons! By putting more balls of the conductive dough on the globe and connecting them with multi-colored LEDs we created circuits, with the electrons flowing in different directions, as the electric tendril sporadically moved from dough to dough, and different lights all over were lighting over. But that was nothing compared to when we strummed our fingers on the dought. Our imaginary ditties, were punctuated by sparks flying from the dough. And that is how the Mad Science Workshop earned it first stripes.
The Awesome Miscope
The Miscope also got high marks from campers and staff alike. Miscope upstage traditional microscopes in two ways, firstly, they plug into a computer, letting you see the image on a larger screen, and secondly, its just a box you put on top of stuff, which are blown up up to 140Xs. Campers looked at their clothing and hair, the computer pixels and plasma globe, but then even in their noses and on their dilating eyes, plus lady bugs and pill bugs too. A camper and I even too the Miscope on a Nature Walk one day. Interestingly, besides for a leaf we looked at, the camper wanted to look at the astro-turf on the miniature golf course or the plastic material on top of the tallest slide. An Unnatural Walk, or something like that. Thank you Ted Scovell, Director of Science Education at Rockefeller University, for lending your awesome Miscope to us!
Diet Coke and Mentos Epic-plosion
Many people that walked into the science workshop looked around, hoping to see explosions. We tried satiating the peoples’ imaginations by blowing up single bottles of Diet Coke using montos candy. Crouds gathered to watch and applauded enthusiastically each time. We thought we had proven our worth. Until one wild-eyed, adrenaline charged middle school-aged camper found us after the explosion. He wanted us to help him make a massive, many bottle, choreographerd explosion, for the entire camp to watch. We said Yes. Of course. The next few nights, we had marathon Diet Coke and Mentos YouTube Video nights. We saw explosion that went straight up and bottle that swung from side to side, and rocket powered cars and crazy domino effects explosions. Check out eepybird.com. We planned out a mashed-up, combination of some of the cool effects from these video. Now it was time for business. Tish B’av afternoon, I drilled 250 mentos down the center, and the camper and his quicky growing circle of collaborators helped to bead the mentos on paper clips. The ammunition was stored in ziploc bags. The next day, we all ran about transporting the soda bottle from storage, drilling holes in the soda caps, setting up the bottles with mentos dangling inside, attaching string to the soda bottles that would explode above us for the grand finale, setting the explosion to music, making an awesome sign...Everything was set up, the camper and his friend were wearing ponchos ready to begin, the whole camp was singing while they waited hungrily...and we BEGAN! Dozens of somewhat associated explosions, and for the grand finale, five bottles perched high above us simultaneously exploded. But then things got crazy, as everyone grabbed a nearby Diet Coke, some still loaded with Mentos, and began spraying each other with soda. Good clean fun!
It all began a long time ago, in a huge suburban mall, off the Palisades Parkway...First day David, Shlomo and I got a ride with Shlomo’s bro to camp, and we stopped off at the mall to pick up some supplies. We planned on having some squishy circuits (http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/) around for campers to play around with. Browsing through Radio Shack, we soon realized we didn’t know which voltage batteries and LEDs we wanted. Thank you Apple store around the corner. With our batteries and LED bought, we just needed to make some conductive play dough, and then campers could have fun with parallel circuits, series circuits and short circuits. Before we left the mall we needed to accomplish one more mission. We planned on doing the egg drop competition, and Alex, the PhD student we worked with, had told us to get Chinese store boxes. Asking about at food stores, we started to see a pattern. When we said we were going to run a science workshop at a camp, we got encouraging looks, but when we continued and said we needed boxes to throw tons of eggs off the porch, then...but we did walk off with a bunch of useless McDonalds paper bags and two from the popcorn stand.
The first day of camp
We sat and sat through the infamous orientation day of pep rallies and safety talks, rules and mosh pits. But, then finally, we got to slide down the soap slicked slip n’ slide. I felt the years melting away. If you are that guy who put the soap in the sneakers I left behind, don’t sleep sound, because I will find you. That night, we found out we’d be setting up shop in one of the large conference rooms and that our workshop name was the Mad Science Workshop. Finally, after deciding we’d run the egg drop competition tomorrow, and after go through Shlomo’s costumes, we shut the lights in Room 608, the Mad Scientists sleeping quarters.
Dropping Raw Eggs is Fun...
I have satiated my need to throw raw eggs at hard surfaces. Come to think of it, I never threw an egg, but campers sure did. First, we sprinkled some science about. We began, “NASA has a problem with landing space ships, because they can explode on impact when hitting the earths surface, and to think about the problem, NASA scientists will drop eggs on hard surfaces but devise contraption to prevent them from breaking. The three relevant science principles are slowing the speed of the falling egg, increasing the total time of impact, and distributing the force of impact over the object. Then we wave around the room and tell the campers they can use anything in the science lab to protect their eggs. And we point about our Lab at the cotton balls, gloves, popsicle sticks, parachutes and glue. Glue. The coolest design by, feel free to disagree, David, was simply a bowl filled with glue. How elegant! The surefire ways of protecting ones egg involved blowing up tons of rubber gloves. From all the attempts made, about ⅕ were successful, I think. But some of these attempts include throwing eggs at walls, and frying them with our Lab hot-plate...Anyways, egg-dropping off the hook. Thanks Alex Hansler for suggesting it!
Squishy Circuits and the Plasma Globe
Eggs dropped. We moved on to baking squishy circuits, requesting a funny bunch of ingredients - Flour to Cream of Tartar - from Reuven, the chef. All went well until we one particularly electromagnetic camper came along. With him leading the pack, our mad science workshop earned its stripes. We had a plasma globe on hand, because what’s a lab without a plasma globe on hand...Its cool how you can put you finger anywhere and a tendril of white electricity connect the center of the globe with your finger. Now, what happens if you put a ball of squishy circuit playdough on the globe? It fills with electrons! By putting more balls of the conductive dough on the globe and connecting them with multi-colored LEDs we created circuits, with the electrons flowing in different directions, as the electric tendril sporadically moved from dough to dough, and different lights all over were lighting over. But that was nothing compared to when we strummed our fingers on the dought. Our imaginary ditties, were punctuated by sparks flying from the dough. And that is how the Mad Science Workshop earned it first stripes.
The Awesome Miscope
The Miscope also got high marks from campers and staff alike. Miscope upstage traditional microscopes in two ways, firstly, they plug into a computer, letting you see the image on a larger screen, and secondly, its just a box you put on top of stuff, which are blown up up to 140Xs. Campers looked at their clothing and hair, the computer pixels and plasma globe, but then even in their noses and on their dilating eyes, plus lady bugs and pill bugs too. A camper and I even too the Miscope on a Nature Walk one day. Interestingly, besides for a leaf we looked at, the camper wanted to look at the astro-turf on the miniature golf course or the plastic material on top of the tallest slide. An Unnatural Walk, or something like that. Thank you Ted Scovell, Director of Science Education at Rockefeller University, for lending your awesome Miscope to us!
Diet Coke and Mentos Epic-plosion
Many people that walked into the science workshop looked around, hoping to see explosions. We tried satiating the peoples’ imaginations by blowing up single bottles of Diet Coke using montos candy. Crouds gathered to watch and applauded enthusiastically each time. We thought we had proven our worth. Until one wild-eyed, adrenaline charged middle school-aged camper found us after the explosion. He wanted us to help him make a massive, many bottle, choreographerd explosion, for the entire camp to watch. We said Yes. Of course. The next few nights, we had marathon Diet Coke and Mentos YouTube Video nights. We saw explosion that went straight up and bottle that swung from side to side, and rocket powered cars and crazy domino effects explosions. Check out eepybird.com. We planned out a mashed-up, combination of some of the cool effects from these video. Now it was time for business. Tish B’av afternoon, I drilled 250 mentos down the center, and the camper and his quicky growing circle of collaborators helped to bead the mentos on paper clips. The ammunition was stored in ziploc bags. The next day, we all ran about transporting the soda bottle from storage, drilling holes in the soda caps, setting up the bottles with mentos dangling inside, attaching string to the soda bottles that would explode above us for the grand finale, setting the explosion to music, making an awesome sign...Everything was set up, the camper and his friend were wearing ponchos ready to begin, the whole camp was singing while they waited hungrily...and we BEGAN! Dozens of somewhat associated explosions, and for the grand finale, five bottles perched high above us simultaneously exploded. But then things got crazy, as everyone grabbed a nearby Diet Coke, some still loaded with Mentos, and began spraying each other with soda. Good clean fun!
SynBio at Camp Simcha
We especially loved exposing campers to the wondrous world of genes, proteins and synthetic biology. Hanging on the wall, above the Miscope, was a picture of human chromosomes, with a gene highlighted. Several campers asked what a chromosome is. We excitedly talked about how life emerges matrix-style from DNA, which is a book of instructions. Using the protein-folding kit, we even showed how proteins can fold into three dimensional shapes just based on the linear set of amino acids. Two campers donned gloves, lab coats or Einstein wigs to dive into actual synthetic biology, using pipettes to practise for an actual bacterial transformation using the GFP and RFP genes. Having all our synthetic biology equipment on display prompted many discussions about genetic engineering. Next time we’ll do a successful transformation, hopefully!
