Middle School

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).

The booth will have hands on demonstrations/props of common chemicals found in natural and man-made items that are commonly found in the house. Our focused is on educating the general public about chemistry and demonstrating to them that chemicals are a part of daily life not to be feared. There will be stick models, chemical structures and props available for people to touch, smell and view. Our job as chemists is to answer any questions the public may have.

Life Science - Exact activity and theme TBD

Our booth will have mathematical activities geared toward creating works of art. Among the activities we will have are sketching activities that leverage projective geometry. In these activities participants will use central projections in order to create linear perspective drawings and anamorphic projections (think 3d sidewalk art, or the skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors). Members of CRMSE (professors and graduate students) will facilitate the activities. Additionally, we may include other activities that have/will be developed in the InforMath Research Collaborative at Balboa Park.