Middle School

We will have multiple interactive stations including: 1) Comparative Brain Anatomy- play a guessing game to see which brains belongs to which animal species. 2) Sheep Brain- hold preserved sheep brain and learn about parts of the mammalian brain. 3) Spiker Box- make a cockroach leg dance and learn about how your brain communicates with your muscles to guide your everyday movements. 4) EMG Module- learn how we can use electrical activity from your muscles to control a mechanical claw.

We will be explaining the chemistry (acid/bases) behind invisible inks. Kids will write messages to their friends or family, and we'll show them how to reveal the invisible messages. The invisible ink will be dilute laundry detergent, milk, or soapy water. They'll write the messages using a paintbrush or cotton bud, and optionally add a "cover up" message using regular pen. Then we'll show reveal the invisible message by shining ultraviolet light on the paper, or by spraying a basic solution.

Activities will highlight concepts from Psychological Science touching upon brain, cognitive, perceptual processes and emotion. Activities will feature visual illusions, sensorimotor tasks, short term memory exercises, mapping of visual shapes to speech sounds, visual inversion and tests for recognizing emotional facial expressions. These activities appeal to a wide range of guests from children to adults. This outreach explores the science of mental processes and behaviors.

NASA's Space Communications and Navigation Program at NASA Glenn Research Center will feature the PufferSphere exhibit. A 360 degree multi-touch, interactive system that can display video, photos, motion graphics, text and any other visual resources. We will also have several Oculus Go virtual reality headsets where visitors can travel from Earth to the Moon learning about current and future space communication.

STEM activities and Makerspace/STEM projects on display from Cajon Valley Unified School District students.

We will have origami creatures, quiz questions, spinning wheel for prizes, and possible "match the anatomy" games.

We will run a hands-on STEM engineering activity

We will be displaying our 2018-19 robot. One of the proudest features we would like to showcase is its arm and intake system. This design allows the robot to pick up different game pieces and flip them to the other side of our robot, preventing the need to turn our robot around when attempting to score. The arm was specifically inspired by "Darth Maul's" double sided light-saber. We will also present how the robot works. Our team will provide any extra information about joining FIRST programs.

Sanford Burnham Prebys will be very hands-on with experiments, showing what we do in the lab, yet on lay-friendly level. We will have things for people of all ages to look at and interact with. Last year children used microscopes and peered into fish tanks to observe how DNA changes can dramatically affect the heartbeat of zebra fish—one of the most powerful model organisms used to study vertebrate biology. We will make the science exciting and interesting for all! (Exact experiments TBD).