Middle School

Various hands on, interactive STEM demos

The JCVI DiscoverGenomics! "booth" is a 40' long, 8' wide mobile laboratory that introduces middle school students to basic genomics concepts and JCVI's cutting-edge scientific research in fields such as synthetic biology and the human microbiome.

Display of aerospace-related demonstration items, including manufactured parts and materials for teachers and students to handle and inspect. Information and experts will be present to offer aerospace career pathway opportunities in universities and industry. Young industry engineers, pilots, educators will engage with challenging critical-thinking examples of aerospace design, manufacturing, operation, including technical skills not requiring a college degree.

Information about the USS Midway Museum, ejection seat, and cockpit to encourage interest in the ship and aviation.

Students will showcase PBL activities along with interactive, hands-on engineering challenges.

Make and Take a Tensegrity Model

This exhibit is organized by the RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB) at UCSD. The PDB is the single worldwide resource for the 3D structures of proteins and DNA. In this exhibit students will learn about the basic building blocks of life: DNA and Proteins. The first part consists of building a small fragment of double stranded DNA using marshmallows and tooth picks. In the second part, students will build a small portion of protein backbone by visualizing it on a computer display and then folding it from a piece of wire.

This interactive, chemistry focused booth will use a multimodality format to demonstrate how our chemists identify and make molecules! Visitors will learn why chirality and techniques like thin layer chromatography are so important in chemical research labs like ours. Participants will be able to smell samples of chiral molecules and guess which chiral molecule they are smelling. A poster and 3-D models of the chiral molecular structures and their significance will be on display.

This year we would like to have 3 different projects to present to the students. 1. Organ matching board: This is a fun activity for younger kids (elementary) to try to match the cartoon organs to the appropriate function and associated disease. 2. Either a Makey Makey board or a Mindflex duel game: A Makey Makey Board (http://makeymakey.com/) is essentially a simple circuit board that can be used as a controller with your computer, which we will use to teach the kids (elementary-middle) about circuitry (grounding, completing the circuit, etc).