Matthew King loves it when the wheels start turning for a kid – both the metaphoric mental wheels and the very literal one that’s soon going to fling them around.
King, a University of Chicago Physics PhD student and experimental neutrino physicist at Fermilab, is one of the hundreds of University of Chicago researchers who will run scientific demonstrations at the upcoming South Side Science Festival, sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement, Biological Sciences Division, Physical Sciences Division and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
The free event will run from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 4, at the Crerar Quad, 5802 S. Ellis Ave. It is open to all, but registration is encouraged.
At the festival, King teaches children the conservation of angular momentum by sitting them on a chair on a free-moving pedestal and having them hold a bike wheel vertically. He then gets the tire spinning fast and tells the unaware youngsters to tilt it.
“It's just a lot of wonder from the kids,” King said. “As soon as they flip the bike wheel over, the eyes light up and they'll just scream, because they don't expect that the chair will start spinning on them.”
It’s a moment of wonder festival organizers want to transform into a lifelong interest in science.
“What I want kids to take away is the ability to think critically, analyze data and understand that curiosity matters,” said Program Director for Inclusive Innovation in the UChicago Office of Civic Engagement Sarah Tinsman. “Ask questions! These are all parts of science, but they are also skills that you can take with you throughout your life.”
For each of the last two years, the South Side Science Fest has drawn more than 4,500 attendees, mostly from ZIP codes near the university. This year’s event will be the biggest in the program’s four-year history, with more than 550 UChicago researchers running 110 scientific demonstrations – from skateboarding into physics lessons and racing through an oversized inflatable colon to smashing liquid nitrogen-frozen fruits and building solar ovens – for South Side children and their families.
“People are literally stepping out of research labs from every corner of the science quad to share their work and excitement for STEM and actively engage with our neighbors and the city at large,” said UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) Assistant Dean of Education and Outreach Laura Rico-Beck, one of the event’s organizers.
‘Smiles, surprisingly’
Fourth-year Medical Physics PhD student Christopher Valdes has been showing children their own blood for three years now, using an ultrasound machine so kids can watch the blood flow coursing through their arms.
“One thing I’ve seen consistently is smiles, surprisingly,” Valdes said. “I see very positive reactions from students ranging from 5-year-olds all the way up to high school seniors. A lot of them are really shocked and really smile a lot when they see something cool that they've never even seen before or touch something they've never even touched before.”
UChicago PME PhD student Thomas Marchese shows kids things they have seen before, just in an entirely new way. Under a scanning electron microscope on loan from Hitachi, South Side Science Festival attendees will be able to see the shearing graphite flakes of a pencil, the tips of their own nails and other common objects up close. Very close.
“You know a bee, but then seeing the eye of a bee and being able to zoom out and zoom out and have that connection to what you've experienced really helps place the scale of what microscopists are able to do,” Marchese said.
Families coming to the festival are encouraged to bring their own objects to scan, as long as they’re dry, non-magnetic and smaller than a quarter.
‘Love from day one’
Assoc. Prof. Matthew Walter of the Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago took a lesson for his robotics demonstration from his own children: Make the robots cute.
“My kids are older now, but when they would come in my lab, they were all afraid of the big robots,” he said. “They didn't want to go near them. But the smaller robots, they love from day one.”
Children and their families will be able to interact with robots that mimic kids’ movements, pick up what they’re told and play Tic-Tac-Toe with arms 3D-printed in primary colors – all designed to enlighten, not intimidate.
King, when not investigating neutrinos or spinning bike tires, said it’s important that the South Side Science Festival demonstrations come from actual working scientists. It helps humanize science, he said, and could help kids see themselves in that role.
“It gives kids a chance to come here and do science with people who are motivated to do science with them,” King said. “Hopefully, that imparts some of that motivation for them to want to do science in the future.”
By Paul Dailing