Kids and Science mesh for summer fun
A small army of robots and some non-Newtonian fluid drew a crowd to Elgin Park Monday afternoon.
It wasn’t an invasion out of a superhero movie, rather it was a visit from the Saskatchewan Science Centre’s outreach program. Approximately 50 children gathered to learn about science and take part in some fun experiments.
“It’s something you don’t always get a chance to experience,” said J.P. Bélanger, an outreach educator at the Saskatchewan Science Centre in Regina.
An Afternoon With the Science Centre — Matter of Fact Show was this year’s local stop by the outreach program and was sponsored by the Moose Jaw Association for Community Living.
“During the summer, the Saskatchewan Science Centre does an outreach program that is mostly dedicated to library programming,” Bélanger explained. “We also do a lot of community events like the one we’re doing here in Moose Jaw. The whole purpose of the program is to bring a little piece of the Science Centre to communities that don’t necessarily always get an opportunity to get out to Regina.” Before arriving in Moose Jaw, Bélanger and Kelsey Paton from the outreach program were in Lumsden that morning. The program has travelled as far north as La Loche, La Ronge and Buffalo Narrows this year. “We go anywhere we can get to in a vehicle. During the school year, some of those schools don’t get a lot of access to that kind of programming, so we tend to go to a lot of reservation schools and a lot of smaller community schools,” Bélanger said. “This is our busiest summer ever. We have over 100 events booked in two months.” During the school year, the outreach program tends to tailor their programming to align with local school curriculum, but in the summer they’re free to branch out. This summer they talked to a lot of the libraries that they partner with before planning their program.
“We tried to look at activities around superheroes. We do a lot of stuff about the body. We did a little bit about construction. We try to have a variety of different things from demonstrations to hands-on building things, to take-home stuff,” Bélanger said. Monday, the Science Centre team’s demonstrations included an Alka-Seltzer rocket and demonstrating some oobleck that the kids were able to touch afterwards. Oobleck — a combination of corn starch and water — becomes a solid when you work with it in your hands and then turns into a liquid and slips right through your fingers once you stop. It’s a non-Newtonian fluid that doesn’t follow Newton’s law of viscosity and acts like a liquid at rest and a solid if a force is applied. “It’s a huge thing and it’s becoming even more common,” Bélanger said of the oobleck. “There’s a lot really cool things you can do with it. Some different science centres will set up a boom box or a speaker and they’ll wrap it in garbage bag and the speaker will bounce it up and down. It’s a really cool effect.”
The children in attendance also learned about complete circuits and ended the afternoon by making one to operate a small robot — called ‘scribble bots’ — that had markers for legs and “drew” Jackson Pollock-esque pictures that the kids got to keep.
The kids in attendance were engaged and some of the keener ones were pretty savvy about how everything worked.
“It’s amazing to see the kind of knowledge a lot of random kids will have across the province,” Bélanger said. “That’s really the point of the whole program — to help promote the importance of reading, help get kids out to the libraries and just having a good time.”
While the program is often in libraries, Monday’s event let them get a little messier and also drew a number of kids who weren’t there specifically for the outreach program but came over from the splash pad to check out the science presentation. “The outdoor stuff tends to be a little come and go, but it’s always a good time,” Bélanger said.