Justin, where are you at? Well, excuse me. Chair. My good sweet login. Yeah, too. See, you do that, yes. I'm like, that's me. Watching the audience enter a new story and then having a conversation at the same time. Yeah. The key is for you guys not to know. Talk to me at the end of the year standing and I'll just, I'll come to the edge of the stage and I'll chat with them. Wow, yeah, that'd be awesome. We'd definitely talk to them. Oh, right, yeah. Jessica was talking about that yesterday. How do I not show this to everybody? So you can type that young innovator's pair. June 11th. Number. The computer. Shoot. Shoot. Why don't you email at this? Perfect. Okay. Now, I can read it to you. Yeah. Need those things about it. We are doing a bunch of interviews throughout the day and we'll be updating the specifics and things like, you know, so people around here, a company called BioBots coming out and they do, which, and they're going to bring it and show it to us and talk about it. So as soon as he... Do you know what time that is? I don't know what time it's going to be.  Make sure that's going to happen. So 10 o'clock based on like real stories. Yeah. So she's going to talk about the book series and the efforts of Girls Know How to increase science involvement, STEM involvement for girls. She'll be here at 10. This could be... This would be perfect. Yeah. So hopefully she'll be able to... And you can give me a question. Jeremy, nice to meet you. We hope to see you later. I just want to start vamping if you're coming with us. Everything's good. Good morning. Welcome to the Young Innovators Fair. We are This Week in Science. We'll be here all day. Yeah. We're a weekly science podcast. We broadcast Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Pacific time. We talk about science and all sorts of other fun topics. We interview people, talk about things that they do and try and bring the science world to you. But today it's all about innovation. It's all about young innovators. It's all about inspiration and creating the future. So come on in and enjoy the show. And if you see someone around that you think would like to come on up and talk to us about science or innovation or if you yourself have a science or innovation topic you might want to talk about on the stage. You can come on up. You want to come up? You want to come up and join us? Okay. Okay, so you can talk right into that, Mike. Get real close. Tell us your name and your age and why you're here. My name is Jordan Collins and I'm 12. And I'm here because I want everybody to have a really awesome time at Young Innovators Fair. Do you do science yourself? Are you an innovator? Sure. Sure. Good answer. What is your favorite thing so far? I know you were here all day yesterday. Yeah. So I really like all the drones but something really cool. What are they called? They're on here. Let's see. What are they called? The Duba dolls. The hip hop duba dolls. Oh yeah, they are the dancers. They're dancers and it's hip hop and so they rap and they sing. And it's all age-appropriate and very positive. Did you dance along? Yes. So are you looking for... Are they on the schedule again today? Yeah, same times. I think one o'clock and 3.30. Nice. We heard them from across the room. We were over here and it sounded like a good show. It was really awesome. Do you like science in school? Yeah, it's my favorite subject. It's your favorite subject? Yes. Why? Why do you think that is? Because everything else isn't interesting to me. What makes science so interesting? The experiments we do, just like what we were learning was like the environment and just like the water cycle. Yeah, absolutely. But it's cool how like everything can be effective by like one thing. Right. So you're already seeing how everything is kind of connected. Absolutely. Yeah, the water cycle is a very important cycle. Yes. Very. Yeah, right now we are experiencing a period of time because of climate change that is moving water from places where it's been to other places. So deserty areas are going to become even more dry. The wet areas might become even wetter. Have really harsh winters on the east coast. Yeah. Dry winters on the west coast. Understanding the water cycle is really important and it's part of why I don't think I ever want to live in Arizona. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's hot there. Hot, dry, heat. But it's apparently extremely warm. It's extremely warm. It's very strange though. Phoenix, Arizona. I drove through, well I haven't, but we drove through like a time zone in Arizona. So we were in Las Vegas and then we drove to Utah, but in between there's like a time change back and forth. So we were in the middle of like Arizona and it was like eight o'clock and then five minutes later the clock changes to seven o'clock or back to nine o'clock. It's like really weird. Yeah, Arizona has a very interesting state time zones allow for the shifting of the sun around the planet so that things can be kind of equilibrated in terms of timing. But Arizona... They don't observe daylight savings, right? They don't observe daylight savings. Yeah. So their time zone is kind of weird compared to everybody else when it comes to daylight savings. Yeah. Which, why do we do that again? Farmers. Yeah, but it's not, right? Because why, that doesn't change the time of day when they can farm. Especially... It allows for an extra hour of sunlight in the winter, I believe. Why don't they just start the day earlier? Your chickens, maybe it's because of the chickens. Good question. The chickens can't tell time. What? Sure they can. The chickens do whatever the sun does. That's what I'm saying. They don't need daylight savings time to know when to get up. They just get up at the same time. Yeah.  That's right. I'm going to start my yearly campaign against daylight savings time again. You're not alone. You're not alone. Although, even though springtime, the spring forward, leads to losing an hour of sleep, which I desperately need more of in my life. In the fall, when I get that extra hour, it makes me very happy. That's like the bully girl right there. One more hour. One more hour of sleep. Especially during school, just wake up later, even though it's the same time. It's great. It is great. Yeah.  For weeks. For weeks. For weeks. We've got robots rolling around out here and somebody running around wearing a very large head. The human bobble head over there. There's a human bobble head running around. We've got some cool robots around. Across the way is the educators experience, which is focused on helping educators gain new tools to educate. Hey, I'm one of those. Huh? I'm an educator.  You should probably head over there at some point. I should probably look. There's lots of things that we'd like to do, lots of shoulds and probabilities, but we might be here all day again. It's looking that way. What are you going to look at today? What do you think? Yeah. What are your plans? Well, I know me and my friend. Well, Layla. Well, how do I say? I forget which way. Is it Layla and I? Yeah. That. So my friend Layla and I are running a stage and where I'm seeing it and making sure everybody's there and having fun. You're pretty important. Yeah. Yeah. You have an important job. Which stage are you running? I think we're, yeah, we're running the inspiration stage. Inspiration stage. Nice. Great. That's fun over there. Interesting. Is it inspiring? Yes. Yeah. There we go.  Is that where the diva dolls are? No, they're at the performance stage. The performance stage. The big one. Yeah. The big one. Okay. What's at the inspiration stage? Yeah. Well, I know we have a seven year old who is helping his school recycle more. We have, let's see, we have Girl Scouts. Yeah. Yeah. We have Braden Coleman. He's seven and already trying to help the world. We have the fashion patrol with a human sewing machine. What does that mean? Human sewing machine. So basically she brings us like two like cross and then like how a sewing machine works.  It's really big holes. So you put your hand in the hole instead of the little thread. You hold the thread. Somebody else grabs the thread and wraps it around.  Wow. So I guess I never really thought about how a sewing machine worked. That's very interesting. Yeah. It's really cool. Yeah. It's a good reminder that you should know how things work in your life. It's good to know how things work. I mean, we rely so much on technology nowadays. Does anybody do, do you know how these smart phones work? We rely on these things now. It's a computer. It's a mini computer. Exactly. I know. It's crazy. There's something to do with RAM or. I know it's got a battery. Hopefully the battery won't catch on fire. There's chips in there. The new battery. Has anybody heard about the new Apple event that they just had? No. It was a new Apple event and they released like really cool technology. Like what? What do you think is really cool? So you know like Alexa and the diet that they have. Yeah. Home speakers maybe like Alexa. Yeah. Alexa wash my car. Yep. So basically Apple's having it and you know Siri. Right. So. Siri just talks to you though. But they're making it smarter. Oh. Now it's going to like crush all the other like home speakers. Probably. My Siri is an Australian man. Yours too? Yes. Oh that's great. I love it. Yeah. It takes me by surprise every time. Yeah. Like I know it's set like that and then like I accidentally like hold on to my home button too long and then I'll just be like I didn't get what you said Jordan. This is perfect. Have you renamed your Siri to something else? Wait. You can name this. No. Just in your head. No. No. But I've made my brother's Siri. I'm calling a really funny nickname. Can you say it into a microphone or not? Should I? Okay. Luke the pooping monster. Oh. That's pretty funny. Great. I used to hate when I like said that and then now it's just funny. Is he younger than you are older? Yeah. He's 10 and I'm 12. Okay. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. He can take a little razz from his older sister for sure. Yeah. It builds character. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So. I mean that's what my older brother likes to tell me anyway. Not just the whole house calls like my brother Luke the pooping monster. That's hilarious. Is he here today? Yeah. I have no idea where he is though. You probably can't hear you saying that over a microphone though right? Yeah. Probably not. It's okay. We'll find this and he'll see it. Yeah. And I'll be like oh my sister. Yeah. So your parents are here today. Yes. Both of them. And what do your parents do here at the Young Innovators Fair? Well my dad is the one who came well my dad and his friend slash neighbor slash cousin slash partner decided to create a STEM related convention game. Hello. Your ears burning. And then so Gabe and my dad Chad decided to create this and I'm obviously Chad's daughter. So then I have a part in this and then my mom is obviously on board because it's her husband. That's not the only reason why. So she's that infamous. She wasn't into it. She used to be like see you later. Right. So she's that info selling merch, answering questions. So it's a family production. Yeah. I love it. Family get families putting forward fabulous content for other families and science content, the STEM, STEAM content. I love the fact also that they've made a point of involving the arts and the performances here as well as the demonstrations of technology and science. So the fact that we've got acts like the diva dolls. We've got performers. We have everything. It's really fun. And we want to talk to someone from the Kimmel Center today. Yay. All right. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us today. It was fun. It was great having you on. That was really a great conversation. Go ahead. I'm going to take that. Take it away. All right. Have a great day. We were talking about you. She helped out. She explained the fair. We can tell Justin he's been replaced. Welcome everyone to the young innovators fair. This is this weekend science. I'm Dr. Kiki. This is a podcast all about science. And today we're going to be talking with innovators from the fair all about the technology innovations that they are bringing to the fair, the demonstrations that they have brought to inspire youth from across Pennsylvania and the greater Philadelphia area in the sciences. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. We hope you are enjoying the show. We are early in the day. We are just getting started. There are a few people here getting special access to the exhibitors and to the exhibits right now until 10 o'clock and at 10 o'clock it's going to be prime time for all everybody's going to have access. The doors are going to be wide open and this place is just going to be flooded. Don't you think Blair flooded? You could just nod your head. Yes. I think that especially watching the weather woman this morning looks like it's going to be pretty hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot here today. It's going to be hot, hot, hot, hot. It's going to be cool in here. So I think even if people were maybe on the fence thinking about going for a nice stroll, this is actually going to stay cool and learn lots of new stuff here today. I hope people stay cool and learn lots of new stuff today. It'll be fabulous. I don't know where Justin is. Um, yeah, who knows, maybe maybe he went to see the Liberty Bell. He's off doing some history, social science instead of actually being here. Is it the Museum of the Revolutionary War? Yeah, welcome. Welcome to the Young Innovators Fair. Hello. We are Science Podcast. We are live right now on YouTube and on Facebook. Yeah. And we're going to be filling out our schedule as the day goes forward with innovators from the fair talking with them about the things that they've brought and what they're doing here. So if you stop by and check the schedule occasionally to see how it fills out, there might be something that you find really interesting to come back and hear. Yeah. Yeah, so we've been, we're a podcast and have been around for a long time. I don't think it's on Audible, though. I don't think we're publishing through Audible. I don't know what that would be. We used to run Audible ads, though. We did run Audible ads, but I don't know if we went out through. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great idea. Thank you. Enjoy the show today. This is great. People are coming up to talk to Blair. I'm going to move the camera just a little bit. So look, see Blair's talking to people about getting them on today to talk about what they do here at the fair. We're going to be bringing innovators to our stage to have conversations about the innovations they're working on, the inspirations that they have for everyone. And we do hope, we do hope you enjoy our coverage of the fair throughout the day. We've got so much good stuff. So much. I'm usually a very good speller, but suddenly now that I'm working on a PowerPoint that's projected to the world, I'm second guessing every word I type.  My head hurts. I find it really interesting. Our unconscious mind is constantly running faster than our conscious mind. Your brain knows which key strikes, which nervous signals it's going to send to use which finger to make which key strikes before you actually make it. And so your brain, because it knows that, actually knows that it's made a mistake before you're consciously aware of it. But because the signal has already been sent down to your fingers, the brain can't stop it. And so that's why after you make a mistake, suddenly there's like a quick pause while you go, uh-uh, and you try and reset and correct the mistake. So I think about this all the time. So we're just constantly working on like a video delay, basically. An entire body. And we're on our existence, right? That's right. We're on a about a quarter second delay. Yeah. Well because, so our eyes collect images upside down. Our brain moves it right side up.  So it feels like we're experiencing things in real time. But we're actually all at a slight delay. At a very slight delay. But the very interesting thing is the way that our brain extrapolates, it does allow us to react to things in real time. Which is good. Or we'd get hit by a lot of things, right? Exactly. Run into walls. You know. Although I do run into walls a lot. Yeah, I did that this morning. I'm like, oh, there's the door frame again. I'd like to blame the jet lag. No, there's no excuse for it. It doesn't matter how much sleep I've had. I still run into walls. Yep, yep, yep. Someday I wish, I really do wish that my brain would get a better sense of the space I exist in. So that it could protect me from that a little bit more. But maybe it's concentrating on other things. Yeah, yeah. Everything's focusing on your beautiful, beautiful brain. That's right. Protect the brain at all costs. I still kind of blame my... Give up the shin. Let the shin be free. Okay. The shin can be broken, but protect the brain. Yeah. My huge growth spurt. I still blame that for my clumsiness because I grew over a foot in a year. Yeah, but that was years ago. I don't care. Your brain should have compensated for your growth spurt. My brain still thinks I'm like four feet tall. Sorry. Your brain should have compensated by now. It's focusing on other things. Oh my goodness. So I'm hope... I'm looking at our YouTube feed and we have a couple of videos that are immediately apparent up there. And I hope that all of three videos from YouTube went up. Hello. Good morning. Good morning. Carrying the cups of coffee. Yes. Yeah, we are... I'm currently enjoying my third cup of coffee. Oh my gosh. I have to go on a coffee hunt a little bit. Yeah. So caffeine, it's a heck of a drug. Yeah, it is. It's very interesting. In college, I tried to start drinking coffee because I was told it was the way to get through college. Yes. And I just never got hooked. Then I lived abroad. I lived in Jerusalem for a while. Coffee there is so strong. And it's a part of the culture. So you drink coffee in the morning and you have to drink coffee every day at the 3 p.m. coffee and tea break. It is part of the culture, right? So I did this every single day for six months. And so naturally I came back very hooked. You would come back very hooked. Yeah. So caffeine is a drug that your body habituates to. Habituation is the process of nerves kind of reducing their activity in response to a signal. So you have to constantly keep increasing your dosage of caffeine to adapt to that habituation.  If you are drinking those molecules, it looks like we've got a guest to our stage. Thanks, Chad. I'm going to move that. Good morning. Who are you? Well, I'm Tyler McGinnis and I'm from the College of New Jersey. I am an education major and also iSTEM is my specialization. Tell us what iSTEM is all about. Sure. iSTEM is a new field. What it stands for is integrative science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Okay. So you're just adding another letter for integrative. I like integrative. Yes. In our school, that's a very important component to it. Good morning. Shift work. That's not good for you, but it's necessary sometimes. Yeah. Yes. Home during the day. Switching roles and working together as a family though. Making it work. We all do that. In various different ways. There are other methods.  But right now, we're stimulating your brain cells because we are talking about this new field, integrative iSTEM, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and you were saying that it's new and it's important at the school where you are currently an education major. Yes, that's right. Integration is a new part. So all of these fields traditionally they're separate entities. You're taught math as a subject. That's a 45-minute subject. Then you go to science. That's another 45-minute block. Then maybe you pick an elective like wood shop or graphics designs or CAD. But at our school, we're trying to get students and teachers to fuse those subjects together. So for instance, like what I'm doing here, one of the things I like to do is people don't think of social studies every subject as part of STEM fields. I can't even come up with an example of something that's not STEM related. What I like to do is talk about culture and a hot topic right now is immigration and of course, all of us in America except Native Americans are immigrants. So I like to talk about Ellis Island. Even Native Americans are immigrants. They came across the Bering Strait a long time ago. Oh, sure they are. Depending on how far you want to go, I guess we're all immigrants from Africa. We're all immigrants from the oceans, really. That's true as well. And if Panspermia has anything to do with it, who knows where we started? That's true. That's exactly correct. So back to what you were saying. With that, when I talk about immigration, I'm Italian and Irish. So my ancestors came through Ellis Island. So I like to talk about what my great-grandfather used to say and the first sign of America he saw across the ocean was this beautiful statue, Statue of Liberty, which we all know and we've all seen. But this is copper. And a lot of students they know that the shell at least is made out of copper and they can recognize that coppers are brown color, they're like pennies. But the little disconnect is where the Statue of Liberty is actually green. So it's a little bit of a disconnect there. So I take one step further and I kind of do a reverse plating process. So I can show the students a process that happened over 15 years by the ocean in just a few minutes. One of the students' eyes, we can turn a penny green, just like Statue of Liberty. That's great. That's wonderful, being able to do something so quickly so you don't have to wait over the long term to watch something happen. Exactly. It's instantaneous. Something you can do in the classroom. And it really intrigues the students. It's kind of like, you can take your lessons one step further by doing something like that for your students and really engage them in a new way. And we were speaking with the educator yesterday. She was talking about the idea of science turned everyday magic. I love that. Really, science is the magic of the everyday.  It's not magic. It's science. This is a chemical process that's taking place. Exactly. That's one of the exciting things. Another thing I like to do in 4th grade and 5th grade especially energy is a big topic. It's part of their physical science unit. So in that, they talk about heat. So with heat, now I can talk a little bit about materials and different materials to transfer energy differently. Like our wires in our house are made out of copper because that transmits energy very efficiently. They wouldn't be made out of wood per se because that wouldn't transmit energy efficiently. So I make two plates. Both plates are black. Same exact size. One plate is made out of aluminum. Transmits energy very well. Aluminum is a metal. Transmits energy very well. So I ask the students, okay, touch both plates. They touch the plates. The aluminum feels cold to them. But really, they're both the same temperature. They're room temperature. It's just the aluminum pulling the heat out of their hand. It seems colder. Exactly. So then I ask them with an ice cube, okay, which one of these plates is going to melt the ice cube faster. Of course they say the plastic, they don't know it's plastic yet because it feels warmer to them and the aluminum feels cold. And instantaneously, the ice cube melts on the aluminum.  You cheated. Let's do it again. But then you have to explain to them, this is energy transfer and the energy is being moved more efficiently through the aluminum. What would be awesome to add to that is an infrared camera to be able to actually show, okay, this is what the aluminum plate looks like now. Here, put your hand on it. You see the hand prints because you've transferred heat energy to the aluminum in that place where your hand has been and so you could actually show them visually through the color change of the infrared. The black body radiation basically. Yes. That would be a great idea because like we were saying before, it is kind of magical. If you take that one step further, they can actually see it. There's something really interesting about when you see a student's face when something that was a topic they completely didn't understand. That was mythical almost to them before. It becomes a subject they understand now. Yeah, the dawning of understanding on somebody's face that's a great moment. Yes, that's what we live for as educators. Beyond that, knowing that you have helped somebody get something, help them understand, there's also the educational goal of inspiring them to inquire more. Firing them. You learned this much. What is your next question? Where can you go from here? Yeah, it's kind of the magic of telling a kid that I told you so or because I said so is never good enough, right? So with trying to explain the world, right? There's always an answer. You can always start to look further. You can always dig deeper in pretty much anything and that's kind of a giant, such a big gift to give to a kid to tell them that they have the opportunity, especially now in the age of information that we live in, that they can find out more about anything. It's so far beyond the dawning of the age of Aquarius. We're not all new. It's not all new agey. It's actually physical properties, mechanisms, things that can be uncovered through the tools of science. Sure, yes, that's right. Yeah, I think we were just talking last night over dinner about how I used to have encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROMs and now you can actually go find out information about anything so many steps deeper than an encyclopedia article just like that. Inquiry is such a huge part of learning now and it wasn't really before. So beyond that, we're also living in an age of fake news, misrepresentation of facts, so taking things that are published, experiments and results and misconstruing the conclusions or cherry picking of data to support your argument. As an educator, how are you looking at or how in your studies, how are people talking about this now, addressing how to teach kids how to look for information and how to source credible or how to know what's credible and not credible? Well, that's a very great question. Actually, we have classes specifically targeting those fields and it's like you said, a lot of these are sensitive topics and as an educator, you don't want to upset a parent or upset a school district but the truth is very important and our students, we really have to instill a quality of questioning for them and even questioning us as educators. Absolutely. If they think we're wrong and they want to question us and defend an opinion that's great and a lot of times for that specific reason we'll have students take role playing, like we'll have a debate and we'll give them articles and justify from a certain perspective, like we'll hold town hall meetings and for instance, it might be an agricultural issue and so we'll have people be farmers, have people be industrial workers, we'll have people be farm hands we'll have people be the typical families taxpayers, we'll have people be the produce, the product buyers, so we'll kind of do that so that people gain perspective because for children, really a great thing to do for them is for them to gain perspective and the question and really, like I said before this might be a civics issue but this does connect to STEM to question things is how science began. How to have a real debate is something that I feel like we really need to make sure to teach our children moving forward because there's you can say that I want to have a debate on a topic or discuss a topic but if you're not willing to have a discourse with certain logical rules rules just like any sport you have to adhere to the rules, right you can't pick up the soccer ball and run across the field if I'm going to engage in a real I'm not listening to you I'm not listening to you if we're going to engage in a real discourse we need to understand and have a mutual respect and a mutual understanding of the rules of this discussion right? and when you do something like that with role playing even sometimes students are surprised by their opinion may change from gaining perspective and that's really important thing as they gain knowledge they'll gain perspective and this really connects back to what we were talking about before like we've all had that math teacher that we say well why do I need to know this and they always say to get through the class and that's not a good answer it's a terrible answer direct was it for next year oh because you want to get through high school no, no, no there's always a use for the mathematics and in STEM it's really important to know that why to have an answer for that why you should never be giving a lesson and think why am I giving this lesson have no answer for it no lesson should be created without a reason for everything you're doing even the worksheets, the assessments the do now, the material there should always be a reason of why you're making your lesson the work is no good so teacher can take a nap because last night was a long one I need to catch up on my reading group I missed a chapter no I think that's a really important point where everything should be purposeful and very intentioned through the educational process because kids are smart kids are observant and they pick up on the fact that they're just having to do something or when I was growing up math, I was kind of ahead of my class in math and the teachers didn't know what to do with me and so they sent me home common issue they sent me home with hundreds of math problems that were repetitive and redundant it killed my love of math I just went home and had hours of addition and subtraction and then multiplication and division and these long division problems first, second, third grade I had hours of this drudgery homework by the time I was in third or fourth grade I didn't like math anymore that's a very common problem that happens in education redundancy does not equal success I had an old teacher of mine he said practice makes permanent it doesn't make perfect practicing perfectly makes perfect do you need 100? No, if you can do 5 perfectly, you're good it makes it permanent that you hate the subject exactly and that's not good I did rekindle my love of mathematics later in life through science because it became it became not just problems to do but a purpose for the mathematics I suddenly had to do the math to discover the proper proportions of chemicals in a chemistry equation I had to use the math for population dynamics in the ecology class that I was taking the math had a purpose and so it became useful and interesting there's always an application and we were talking with some guy yesterday who's here Laura, something or other mathematics festival it sounded so great he's got all sorts of problems to solve they make math sound fun and I was like I want to go to your booth, oh my gosh I want to go play with your math that's awesome at the booth that I have here we're doing something similar to that I have some problems they're the popsicle stick problems they're very logic based so you might ask something like you'll have 4 popsicle sticks oriented in a cross pattern and you'll say how can we make a square by moving one popsicle stick the first thing that comes to students mind is the actual shape of a square well the shape of a square in geometry is also described in algebra if we think about a square it has perfect sides they're all the same so if we think about just as an example like a 2 by 2 a square that's 2 to the power of 2 which is 4 so if we take that cross pattern we can easily move one stick to make a 4 that's called the problem so I have many problems like that which I love to do with students especially as a do now because it's a nice simple problem that they can do they can work together and it gets them engaged and ready for the lesson ahead and kids love teaching each other things I think that that's definitely the way that I learn best is by teaching other people something that I just learned in kids as they grow and that's a perfect example is if you teach them a little trick or a riddle and it's actually math or science that's something that they can then take to their friends and they are so excited to share oh they are, even here they are after they learn a couple of these they run off, grab their friends they bring them over and see if they can solve them can you do it? I did it can you do it? I think that's one of the things that we're doing now the science communications aspect was the fact that I found my favorite times being involved in science was when I was taking what I had learned and was teaching a class or whether I was working one on one with somebody or I was taking my research to an academic conference and explaining it to people it was all the outreach communications efforts to do this it's so great nothing gets me more excited in my day job than when I've learned something about animals or conservation and then I get really excited about it and then one of my teen volunteers asks me the exact question I had asked I sometimes jump up and down and I go I'm so excited to tell you I was wondering that too and it's it's just still so fun to teach people about other things that are amazing how do you keep teaching fresh for yourself? how do I keep teaching fresh for myself? how do you keep it fresh? I'm still a student actually so I've only had a few assignments but keeping it fresh is for me it's exciting to students like we said and something as simple as a lesson could mean all the difference if you take a lesson that might not be so fun like many math lessons unfortunately tend to become not so fun because there's a lot of students that will struggle with the material and it's very understandable of why I mean a lot of these topics are very big yeah so you might want to take a little bit of fun with yourself and turn one of them into a song do a dance take a break do an exercise do something for the students really as long as the students if your students are having fun you're going to have fun everybody get up jumping jacks no and of course this works better in elementary school which is what my major is yeah so we were sometimes making a fool of yourself in front of kids it breaks some of the tension definitely and it allows them to get a little bit silly but you have to take the first step for sure that's right so in your study so you're working on elementary school age teaching aiming towards that so you have to be kind of a generalist you have to have you have to have the ability to teach reading, math, social studies science all the subjects to these kids and make it interesting as opposed to I am just a chemistry teacher where you just focus on a single subject not to say just a chemistry teacher I mean only we know a few subjects of chemistry to teach we teach chemistry all day that's one of the hard things about education elementary school once the students come in it's like okay it's the Mr. McGinnis show you have to be there with them all day and it is hard to I mean yes it's elementary level material but it is hard to master every subject every day for every lesson that is something that I even have trouble with so in elementary school it's a nice idea to have a specialized field like they do have elementary schools where you'll have a just a science and math teacher and just a social studies and English teacher so that you can specialize and I think that is very valuable for the student because sometimes you just don't bond with a teacher you know we've all had that experience where there's nothing against the teacher just personality wise you're not really making a great connect so if you have multiple teachers throughout the day most more teaching styles more subjects more content areas for me my content areas of specialization of mastery are in science and mathematics so when I'm teaching a poetry lesson it might not be as thorough and as involved as someone who has majored in English or language arts right for creative writing so that's that is a hard thing about elementary school we do we try to share ideas with each other a big thing that teachers can do is work with each other you know bounce ideas off each other share material because in a group we can have stronger lessons than if we're all working by ourselves absolutely and like you said the integrative aspect is really important so you can take you know a a section of your studies on say the planets and you can have the students break up and learn about different planets and explain them to each other you can also listen to you know you can listen to classical music the planets movements but I don't remember what composer that was there's the planets there's like a whole classical thing anyway yeah and you can have them paint for the arts paint their visualization of the planets you can have them maybe write short fiction stories about what it would be like to live on those planets so you can integrate all of these subjects into this scientific framework right and that's very powerful for students if you can get every teacher on board to be teaching a unit at once with each other so everything is interconnected with each other that's very cool for the students that reinforces it it helps them remember you're targeting more parts of their intelligence you're targeting the artistic side their writing side their spiritual side their science side and when you do that they can recall better there's more parts of their brain that are activated when they think of that topic as we're moving farther away from a teacher at a blackboard you know lecturing and kids copying down notes and doing problems and stuff like that and more towards kind of inquiry based activity based learning which we are the teacher becomes your activity based learning but we're definitely moving towards a teacher being a guide instead of an expert right so they're a guide through a classroom right yeah and so you don't need to be an expert in everything to be a good teacher we know that now right so you can be an excellent teacher by being a good guide through a process and you don't have to know everything and I think that's also a really important lesson to teach kids is even though I'm your teacher right now I might not know the answer to one of your questions let's figure it out together right that's exactly right I mean a big thing I say to my students is don't be afraid to be wrong all scientific discoveries were made by being wrong once we're wrong we can eliminate one of the options and start over again it's a great process and when you're in school you're not here to know I would never hold not knowing an answer against a student you're here to learn not to know now that's a good point there's a lot of pressure on kids to know things how about the pressure take off the pressure and how about make it fun to learn make learning the goal yeah I think there was a lot of focus for many students for a long time on the grade achievement so achieve the A do whatever it is to get the A grade not actually learning the material and with teachers having to teach to the test and all these things the classrooms have turned into these kind of these very goal oriented environments as opposed to it being a very just more of an educational learning environment yes that's true I mean the standardized test there's a huge push for that I guess as all of us know already in New Jersey we have the Common Core and we have in Pennsylvania we have the Park I believe is that right or is it PSSA it's PSSA in Pennsylvania and the park in New Jersey I believe and so these two tests we teach a lot of these a lot of these programs that we purchase at schools that we have to teach are targeted to passing their version of the test exactly which is in my opinion no good if you teach authentically and you're teaching the material the students will be able to perform properly towards learning and not towards specific information yep well that's true test design is actually important but we are coming up on 10 o'clock here and we're going to be speaking with Ellen Langus from Girls Know How about her book series in just a few moments Tyler it's been wonderful to talk with you can you tell people what your booth is if anybody's watching this I don't know if anyone's watching this we're going to come to the Young Innovators Fair but tell us more give us a little sum up sure well first off thank you for having me it was my pleasure at the TCNJ booth we have a little bit of science experiments that children can try out I have a lot of experiments with light and light diffusion and light polarization which is a mythical topic for many students light is not discussed to a great extent in school or very thoroughly throughout and so at my booth I'm just trying to gain a little bit of interest with that we're also turning pennies green which I've talked about and we're trying a few brain teasers and then lastly we have these things called little bits which are really great oh I love little bits I have those oh they are they're fantastic they're expensive but of course we're the college so we brought them for the students to play with what are little bits it's magnetic circuits so it's got all the circuitry components and they're using magnets so because of the positive negatives of magnets you can't really stick things together in the wrong way and then it allows for the electricity to flow through to run motors or light bulbs or you can design all sorts of things yes that's what makes them great for setting like this I don't have to set up soldering irons I don't have to have breadboards I don't have to have little pieces for the circuits the kids can just come up they're much recuted the stuff doesn't heat up they can't damage it they're fantastic for this type of setting they're absolutely wonderful I completely agree they're fun to play with I love them my son and I play with them all the time all grades like them so they are great so thank you the last thing we have is we're talking about our graduate program so if there's any potential teachers here if they want to come over and see we have this new masters in STEM we also have material for that but thank you thank you for having me you're absolutely thanks for stopping by thank you so much my pleasure have a wonderful day that was Tyler McInnes and what was the name of the booth again TC the College of New Jersey TCNJ the College of New Jersey is here and they've got activities for your kids and also information about their STEM graduate program if you're interested welcome everybody to the young innovators fair we are this week in science we are a weekly science news podcast you can find us online at twisttwis.org we're going to be here all day long talking with innovators from the fair talking about the innovations that they have brought we are going to be also talking about science news and things that are really interesting in science and at 130 we'll be on the lab rat stage doing a science quiz that's right all about science news all stories we've reported on our show on our weekly podcast this week in science every Wednesday at 8 p.m. pst so I guess that's 11 p.m. EST 11 p.m. EST that's right but we're also on YouTube and on iTunes so you can always catch us later you can at a reasonable hour we're going to be joined here right now by another guest and we're going to be talking about inspiring girls and STEM good morning good morning do you want to hold this or yes okay can you please introduce yourself to everyone hi I'm Ellen Lange and I am the author of the girls know how book series it's designed to inspire girls to think about what they want to be pursue the careers of their dreams the career so what kind of careers are we talking about you say careers of their dreams this is imagine big imagine anything imagine being an astronaut going to Mars well that's not even in the imagination anymore so girls can pretty much do anything that they want to do and we found that out because we surveyed 1000 girls to find out what they wanted to be and it turns out that girls want to be everything what is the number one thing girls 8 to 12 said they want to be wow 8 to 12 I have no idea I'm really out of touch with 8 to 12 year old girls obviously well I think they pick the career that they see the most of which is teaching teaching right so we have everything from doctors teachers we also surveyed them to find out if they thought there'd be a female presidential president and certainly they thought so boys weren't so sure about that and the number one thing boys said that they want to be was an astronaut professional athlete so I tell all the girls to go become physical therapists so anyway that's right the guys you can be an athlete become a physical therapist you will always have a career because there's lots of injuries so we said we started with journalism for our first book and then construction and then teaching of course and then just this month we are launching super science girls for STEM okay so tell us about the super science girls I mean we're at the young innovators fair and science plays a big part in innovation so what's the plot what's happening in this book so all of our books are fictional chapter books but they introduce a character who's based on a real life female role model typically we've used adult role models but in this case we worked with Sylvia Todd who was a super innovator at an age of 8 came up with a web show with her dad which is very popular but anyway our character is named Sylvia and she and her best friend Kristen always went to science summer camp and they were hoping when they got into middle school this fall they would win it excuse me seventh grade is it ever won well unfortunately Kristen can't go to camp and while Sylvia is at camp Kristen gets lured into the super popular group with Indra the new girl and things go awry oh no instead of working on her science experiment with Kristen she's outside looking in and we learn in the meantime about the scientific method we get to see the girls working on different experiments as part of the plot line which is fun and then we learn about some really amazing female scientists as we go through it as well so all of the books not only teach about a particular career they also weave in things like teamwork communication skills leadership and family values as well so there's some really good learning about not just about science it's an interesting story it's going to have a good I guess there's a good element of I'm missing the word but there's a good there's a good rift between the two girls and what they want to do and so there's this conflict thank you very much I lost it Kafefe whenever I miss a word I'm going to start saying Kafefe so we've got conflict we've got drama we also have the educational aspect that the girls reading this can potentially take these really important life lessons we hope they do and in the back of the book there are a lot of fun things to do so there's a word match game there is a also some activities to help you think about what do you want to be when you grow up oh that's fabulous how often do young kids especially middle school maybe high school is when people are usually approached by the school counselor to talk about these things but yeah winter middle schoolers how do they approach that it's a very good point and then you can also download those items at girlsknowhow.com for free so if you don't have the book but your point is well taken because really at high school it is hard to say oh suddenly I want to be such and such the books the idea is to start exploring at a young age and because you'll see that girls will say I want to be a dancer today I got someone to say I want to be a face painter you know other girls will say I want to be an electrical engineer well they sort of know but if you don't know I remember my daughter wanted to be a lawyer so I said you know what I want you to have a phone call with a lawyer and interview her and so she interviewed the lawyer and got off the phone and said mom that's not what I thought lawyers did yes you know absolutely and then so she had a she didn't really understand how it worked and so she had to wait to find out two years into law school that this wasn't for her oh yeah yeah so this this gentle exploration and encouragement from parents and from teachers and from family members a lot of kids don't even know what their parents do yeah absolutely well I'm getting a lot of kids now in my team volunteer programs I asked them what they want to do for a living and they I've gotten so many say I want to be a YouTuber right oh my gosh my son says that at six I want to be a YouTuber I want to be like Dan TDM I understand the desire but I feel like that energy can be channeled into something productive and so you can be a YouTuber who is doing educational videos about science um Sylvia did right or you can be an electrical engineer who also does YouTube videos to explain concepts yes show people how to build little toys out of electrical components exactly so it's not enough to say I want to be a YouTuber it's what what is your expertise going to be right and that's why we ask the girls especially in this questionnaire what skills might you need what education might you need do you want to live at home do you want to travel think about how much you're going to make so we do talk about some of those serious things but at this age is the time to explore and what happens is research shows that up to the age of 12 kids are on a level playing field girls have the same ambition the goals as boys do suddenly the magic middle school years come in and all of a sudden they're thinking about social acceptance body consciousness plays a big place and all of a sudden math science and brains oh maybe I'll downplay you even told me you downplayed yeah and so my personal story at that age in middle school is I was the straight A student but I didn't really fit in with the popular girls I wasn't one of you know I was I was the girl who used words that were too big kiki or they called me Kirsten and why do you always use such big words and so I felt left out and kind of on the fringes and there was a spelling bee and I went into the spelling bee and was doing really well and probably was headed for the finals I hadn't missed a word yet and I thought to myself that if I won that was just going to be one more thing to differentiate me from everybody else so I spelled a word wrong on purpose I threw a spelling bee to be accepted I think a lot of women are guilty of that when we look back at what we downplayed our assets in many cases and that's what we hope that girls don't do so we hope that books like this and people like you I mean I've made it I got past that I figured it out since then but it's one of those stumbling blocks sometimes I think we all you know go over that line a little bit like no we're fine now yeah but middle school girls can be very difficult in terms of that social acceptance and so if you can instill a sense of self-esteem self-value, self-confidence in what these girls are interested in your interests are valuable you are valuable as a person you don't need to be looking externally for validation look for validation internally and if you can start teaching that and giving girls ideas on how to approach their future it's such a it's going to give them a strong base to work from I think once you get that base the sky's the limit I think my hope for girls is that they know that with some hard work some passion and perseverance they can achieve anything they dream absolutely yeah and hopefully these books girls know how Super Science Girls is the most recent of the books it's just being released so it's written for middle school girls 8 to 12 more queens elementary school yeah middle school elementary school to middle school and they're available at girlsknowhow.com or barnsandnoble.com as well I think that's wonderful what's the next book you're going to attend what do you think what career we do a lot of polls to find out you know we've tackled the ones that we've heard so far I don't know what do you think politics politics would be great I'd settle for more senators more female senators female senators is a great thing too yeah politics would be fabulous we do need an equal representation well we not only need women leading the politics we need women to make sure they're voting as well and more women on the boards in companies and leadership positions the statistics show that when you have a woman on the board that you're going to have a better bottom line that's fantastic that's what the stats show that's what the stats show the science shows us we're going to keep pushing forward and hopefully events like this books like the ones that you're writing that these things can really help girls work from a place of inner strength to do what they dream as possible thank you so much thank you so much great to speak with you thank you and you are here at the young innovators fair you have a booth where is it located we're signing books in the numbers section and it's three to three thirty on the big stage we'll be doing a career adventure workshop as well and the builders boulevard so anybody interested in girls in STEM and inspiring young girls in STEM head over three three thirty at the builders stage you're welcome alright everybody this is this week in science welcome to the young innovators fair we're going to be here all day long talking to innovators talking about what they have brought to the fair and talking about what they're doing outside of the fair in the real world hopefully finding out about some great science and technology we're being joined on the stage right now by who are you we are here we go actually give you a microphone we're with destination imagination we're a non-profit organization that teaches the creative process to students from imagination to innovation students solve long-term challenges they go to a little louder students solve long-term challenges and they bring them to the tournament with them the challenges are based on steam so STEM and the arts and service learning as well and at the tournament they're presenting just some fabulous solutions that show not just what they've learned in steam but kind of the project management skills and 21st century skills that they're getting from solving them completely on their own and so do they go into this as teams or individuals it takes at least two to seven kids to participate so you need a friend everything we do has teams involved and so how do you go into schools is this an after school program is this how do you get how do you find the kids how do the kids find you well we we love this innovation fair because you're seeing a lot of passionate kids and parents and teachers and so anyone can form a team it does not need to be through a school but a lot of times it could be through after school programs but it can be interested parents who are involved with their kids and they have a place for the kids to meet and they don't have to know anything about the science it's all we have two rules in the eye all ideas and workmanship come from the team and the second one is if it doesn't say you can't then you can oh I love that and so it really allows them to read like what are the rules and then how can they stretch or bend the rules right not just see the not just see the walls that are confining them but actually kind of find the holes and exactly and so our logo is a box and ball and the ball is that you always hear out of the box thinker yeah that's the red hot on fire thinker that has ideas popping like popcorn they might not finish things but they have the ideas and the research shows half the people are creative in the box and they make a better box and so we purposely work with creativity on both sides of the box interesting so attacking creative problem solving from different perspectives so whether you start with an interest in science and you learn the arts or the other way or the other way around but I think the kids learn that you could have the best idea but if you can't sell it you can't pitch it it doesn't actually come to life and so those presentation skills are vital to make people want it yeah so you said you mentioned this is a tournament so what's the timeline when do people get involved and what kind of timeline do they run on it depends on the team challenges are released in early September and so teams usually start well they'll start reading the challenges and preparing solutions for the long term challenges then I mean there's some teams who have been together for years there was one team originally from Virginia they actually did DI every year for 12 years they were the team that had been together since elementary school and it was amazing they probably after several years they probably just work together so well and just had this they probably developed some kind of a working process and interactions with each other yeah that's probably a relationship that'll last the rest of their lives a lot of them they'll know each other the first year is around the teamwork to survive coming to tournament because it's the longest and most intense a team that they've been on and then the second year they get right to solving the challenge it's really kind of fun to see that and those are the teams that every year you look forward to seeing as appraisers at the tournament you'll kind of know the name from previous years and they're the team that comes in I usually appraise instant challenge where the team has no idea what they're about to solve and they come into the room and they're solving a challenge with limited materials with limited time right there on the spot five minutes it sounds like one of those locked room kind of escape room escape room challenge all that's in the room is a block of ice and it's melting get yourself out in the same way as escape rooms can build teamwork among teams they actually use instant challenges to do that as well throughout the year you can get a great rapport as a team you know the teams that have been working together by how they do an instant challenge because that's the true test of their teamwork at the tournament what kinds of challenges are involved like what kind of things do you put out for people sure so this year I was actually involved with one of with writing one of the main challenges they just finished global finals at the end of May and the challenge was called show and tech the team had designed their own stage that was able to move a team member from one location to another so it had to hold the full weight of the team member while they moved them they also had to have two technical effects that enhanced their performance that had an opening act and a headlining act and eight minutes to present all of this so they're getting the arts in there but with a very technical side to it they're designing the machinery which is what I do in real life I actually design rock concert stages and machinery for that now I like that's an awesome career it's cool to see the kids doing that on a smaller scale to present that in eight minutes at the tournament we ended up with teams who made stages that looked like gears and clockwork that would rotate around with the team members on them it's amazing to see what they do with this $200 budget that they're given so they get a budget and it's $200 so very limited it's trash to treasures that's really part of the fun to see what can you do with the shower curtain with the toilet paper roll and in our booth we have fabulous examples of team created elements that we've collected and it's definitely worth coming and taking a peek my son, he's six years old and he likes fiddling with stuff and putting things together and he comes up with these ideas for things to build and I'm like why don't you throw that away and he goes mom it's my miscellaneous junk that's how I was I had brown bags full of just junk here it was just accumulated I probably still have of it have some of that in my craft closet that eventually you've you know you've got something in the back of your mind you've got a catalog of all the things that you have you're like I know I've got something that's going to fit this need right now actually some of my hat is that the tubes on my hat that I had sitting in the junk I had one of those but you painted it and I just I had a purpose for it suddenly so you know you keep it around for long enough and that's how the DI kids are they have junk lying around they go searching for junk where they need to use it for their solutions oh my gosh I love it so we're here and we're shamelessly recruiting for teams we want to make sure that everyone understands how accessible the program is that there's really no barrier to participation it takes just three things two to seven kids an adult that's going to keep them safe and a place to meet and is this a national program or is this local it's international it's international so this is being on here we can talk about this anybody you have kids anybody can get involved in this absolutely so church groups school providers, homeschoolers interested parents and when you participate I've just moved here from Illinois but I had a mom who just her best friend participated as a youngster she wanted it for her kids all of a sudden with a few words she had eight teams formed this year got together and 28 teams formed from one town this is the kind of it's such an amazing program but then I got started 20 years ago with our own child and we had a ton of fun it sounds like it would be so I'm like I want to start a team are there age limits for the kids we have teams all the way from kindergarten through second grade we have a non competitive level competition usually begins around third grade it's a lot of fun it really is competition starts around third grade we compete against your age level so we have four different age brackets elementary level, middle level secondary level for high schoolers and then university level we usually have a few university teams who go straight to global finals it's fun to watch as well I'm sure the university teams by the time you're in university you've developed all sorts of skills whether they be science, engineering fabrication you've gone through many processes as a worker to some degree well we are and we also have had in the past like this DI extreme so we have the ability if there's a group that wants to do a team building event we can come and torture the students for a day where they do all the work in a day university level we might do at 10 o'clock at night give them the challenge and they present in the morning like we're definitely fun factor but when you were asking when kids get started it's very dependent on their age like high school kids can do this in weekends and they can just get to work and spend longer times kindergarten, you're probably talking five weeks or so to get there ready once a week, twice a week something like that and it's building the teamwork and doing some instant challenges and getting to know each other and what your strengths are and then working a little bit each week but third grade and up you have everything just like a sports team some that are at intramurals some that are at elite some that are travel and so you'll see teams that might start in January or they might start in September like it's their choice how much time and energy they want to put towards this one thing I really want to make sure we get in is how independent the teams are there is a rule with DI that it is no interference where your team manager cannot contribute ideas to your team's solution everything comes straight from the kids they're creating this all by themselves and if they want to learn a skill they can absolutely, we've had elementary schoolers learn to weld, learn to sew that's fantastic do they make tiny welding masks? kids size welding masks I'm sure somebody has that junior my husband would run a little workshop with tools like so touching saws you probably want to learn how to have something stand up and so how to work with the hinges and so those are kind of just building their skills giving up confidence that they really can do this themselves they don't need to work your little one would they still learn beginning, middle and end to a story how's the audience going to know where you are and all the things this sounds fabulous I love things that just involve creativity and just whatever you can use whatever field whatever discipline happens to fit into your solution you grab from that it's the integration of different disciplines to make it work and that's actually part of it too there's a whole scored element of the challenge called team choice elements where the team can pick whatever skills they have and add them to their solution and be scored for that so if you're great at writing poetry you can put poems in there to write your own code to program a robot you can put that code in as a team choice element and so the teams you have the semi-directed challenges but it's very open-ended and the team can put their own skills whatever they'd like to highlight in there as well that's fabulous so we're getting to the end of our time can you sum up once again destination imagination and where you are and what you've got here at the young innovators fair definitely fun and we masquerade learning and actually the children apply what they know in school in innovative ways and the way that shows off their talents and interests in adult language you are project-based learning and steam but we do mechanical engineering structural engineering the other thing is if you are an old kid and you still like this stuff we're looking for volunteers to appraise the tournaments or to work with kids so we want to make sure we're very inclusive in that way or if your company that wants to get involved or sponsor a local school or anything like that we're definitely a 501c3 non-profit and we're willing to help stretch your money and have some pretty serious so nasa is a sponsor disney motorola solutions 3M has been a long-term sponsor they love duct tape all of our kids love duct tape you've got to roll around here yeah we do exactly I've done so many things with duct tape we set the world record for the duct tape falls a few years ago that's wonderful thank you so much for joining us I know that you came by yesterday a couple of times so you weren't able to talk with you because of timing so I'm really glad we got a chance to talk with you about what you're doing this is great I'm going to look up online do you have a website destinationimagination.org we've got a Pennsylvania DI Facebook page as well fantastic thank you so much great meeting you and speaking with you yeah we're going to come see what the kids have made yeah we're like right where there's a big opening we'll screw the door to the right and you'll see if you block some of the lights so thank you so much for the opportunity you're welcome there you go alright everybody this is this week in science welcome to the young innovators fair we are here all day interviewing innovators here at the festival fair about what they've brought what they're doing out in the real world and we hope you find some of it interesting we give you a little bit more information and give you maybe a direction to go here in this amazing hall of innovation alright we hope you are ready to enjoy some fun there's a lot of hands-on activities here at the young innovators fair this week in science is also going to be on the lab rat stage at 1 30 p.m. for a science quiz so if you want to be part of the quiz or be part of the game show audience make sure to join us at the lab rat stage at 1 30 p.m. hi who are you random person just walked up awesome I love it my name is Dan Borgoff I'm the education coordinator for maker depot academy okay so what is maker depot academy what do you do there maker depot academy is a non-for-profit out of north jersey although we're spreading throughout jersey now that helps school districts create better maker spaces inside of their schools oh wow I know that there's a movement right now for maker spaces in general where there are these locations that have fabrication tools and tool cabinets with things that makers can come in and basically you have a membership fee and that supports the space so how do you integrate that into a school setting well that's how we actually started maker depot itself is a commercial maker space the largest in New York and New Jersey that was started by a group of friends who wanted to show other people how to build stuff and then found the rest of us who were really excited so they weren't teachers they were just makers who decided that they wanted to build all these things and have people come in and pay a membership fee things like that well then they found us which was a bunch of teachers who were really interested in the maker movement but really didn't know how to get started with a lot of this stuff and really didn't have a place to experiment and learn how to do it outside of our classrooms which are very you know stuck you know we're not allowed to do a lot so a couple years ago we got involved with them and created maker depot academy which is the not-for-profit side of the business that helps us as teachers because we're all classroom teachers build and go into schools themselves and say we want to take all of these things from the maker movement and bring them into schools but in the right way one has to be safe number one kids have to be taught proper use of the tools of the machinery and then there's probably also certain ages like how old do you have to be to use certain equipment well so just like any other education curriculum everything has a progression it's all scaffolding is built on another kind of building thing you know any kind of skill you don't just give kids a table saw although we do have safe table saw you cannot get cut on which is great oh that's fantastic we have these things called saw stops that actually if you touch the blade it will retract the most you'll ever get is a paper cut they're great that's awesome but we don't typically put those in the that's the best that's good policy I'll just watch it spin anyway they can't reach but what we try to do is more than anything else is figure out a way to get maker skills into the school even starting in pre-k so all of our teachers are from different levels so we start with like for example in the district that I'm in right now we're taking everything we learned in maker depot academy creating a K through 12 maker curriculum that integrates into all the other core subjects and you're working with the common core curriculum New Jersey's adopted its own was going common core and kind of went back to its own but they're also working with the next generation science standards which is kind of in line with that but and New Jersey itself has also added some just recently in the last year added some more standards that have to do more with hands on learning which is great for us you know because it really gives us a leg to stand on when it comes to integrating these curricular choices absolutely so that's what we're doing now it's good because when the maker movement first started in schools they thought the first thing that you should do is go out and spend three thousand dollars on a 3D printer and like oh look I have a 3D printer now I have a maker space and we try to get people out of that mindset the first thing they say to us is I want a 3D printer I want to learn 3D printing and the first thing I ask them is do you also want to learn inkjet do you want to learn laser jet how excited are you to learn I'd like to learn dot matrix vintage so we get to this point where they're like really excited about this and I say no you need to learn 3D design because it really is just a printer it was a bad night between an inkjet printer and a hot glue gun that's all a 3D printer is so we need to get them to learn design and once they learn design they can put that into it so let's bring CAD into the classroom exactly and you can do that even as early as five and six years old using tinker CAD which is free and you can use it inside the chrome browser so anybody who has chrome books or anything like that still has access to this all these schools going from one to one can do 3D design right in their classrooms and not have and use it for science and math like everybody says for stem and steam and all that but they can also apply it to social studies and language arts which is really where that bump has been people are like well we can use it for this stuff but we're never going to integrate it, sure you can yeah you can, absolutely you're not thinking big enough what about 3D printing people women all the little parts and everything making it real small, making it big doing something with a green screen which again comes under a bunch of different things as far as technology and video editing but that's all maker skills I'm trying to get people to get away from using stem and steam as their limitations we couldn't agree more yeah maker is really where we're trying to go for it the term maker encompassing stem, steam, stream which is the new one so show nine recently said at a certain point you add enough letters it's just called school yeah so if you call it all maker skills you get rid of that, let's keep adding letters to it until it's just let's just teach now the alphabet welcome to the english alphabet I can't wait to see what they come up with I'm trying to figure out they got x-ray covered let's try and see what they can come up with that's now a thing with jazz hands with jazz hands so again coming into do you as the maker academy are you taking things into the classrooms our schools buying certain things so they have them available and then experts are coming in are you teaching the teachers or are you doing are the kids leaving the schools and coming to your maker facility how does it work okay all of the above we hope that schools come to us first because a lot of times they're not doing it right they're buying three thousand dollar printers and that does not make a maker space they don't understand the back end it's supposed to integrate into the rest of their school so when they come to I can't even tell you how many schools have said we just spent twenty thousand dollars on equipment but we don't have one person who knows how to use it we went into a school in Newark recently that had built one of the first maker spaces ten years ago and it's been collecting dust in a basement for ten years nobody knows how to use any of the equipment beautiful really good equipment that nobody knows how to use one of the first maker bought 3D printers was in there one of the new maker bus don't really work so the old ones worked great and it was really well put together but nobody knows how to use it so we hope they come to us first we've tested everything we're kind of the experts in this at this point and not only because we are the makers that know how to build this stuff but also because we're a bunch of teachers who have actually tried this stuff out so are you still in the classroom I mean are classroom teachers or supervisors in districts and we're all over the state which is great we come together for events and what not but a lot of the planning that we do is online and we come together and say what can we do for this school this is their situation this is how much money they have what can we do for them they want 3D printing that's fine but how many kids do they have per class usually it's anywhere from 17 to 25 typically so we say alright instead of buying $13,000 3D printer we want you to buy 10 $300 3D printers nice because then you can 3D print takes anywhere from 3 hours to 20 hours to build something so how are you going to satisfy a whole classroom alright children let's all watch paint dry that's really what it is we can do one project today this week this week for one child and 3D printers fail a lot so you don't want to be building really big 3D prints and stuff that's what they say well we got the biggest one available and that's what we spent all our money on and we're really happy about that and then they try to build on it and they're like oh we made a huge mistake the practical aspects they got excited about the size or the intricacy of whatever didn't actually think about the practical application what is that from Jurassic Park your scientists and your researchers spent all that time trying to figure out if you could you never stopped for a second to figure out if you should there you go that's a good use of a quote right there that's what we run into more than the time that we're working on these things that's what we run into with teachers and administrators but we don't know how to get there so they just throw money at it hoping that it just comes about so what we do is we go into schools and say alright we're going to help you design the space or the carts we design carts and stuff for them so they're not spending money on carts that weren't designed to take a beating or made of whatever and we'll build a lot of them but a lot of times we just tell them what to buy we'll also do a consultation but we also do professional development so they can come into our space or we go to them I use up all my sick days and all of my time to go to these schools and help them get their programs off the ground we don't really build curriculum for them we ask them do you have an enthusiast do you have somebody in your school who's going to be interested in learning about all this stuff and then take it from there it's like you just need that toe hold you need an anchor you need somebody who's going to sit behind it and say okay the 3D printer broke it's not the end of the world let's fix it because they are fixable you can take them apart put them back together again it's like a teachable moment you get the kids to build it for you and design it and take it apart again you don't have to even do it and they will take charge of it they have ownership at that point my original maker space that I built was completely designed and built by my students and they wouldn't let anybody mess with it and the same thing goes for a lot of the districts that we've helped now where we try to get their kids involved in it right away it becomes theirs it's not just buying a bunch of equipment and saying here we just spent $50,000 worth of equipment and materials they don't have ownership of that they don't feel part of it so they're not going to take care of it so what are you doing here today? what have you got here at the young innovators fair? well today we have we're running the maker space on behalf of the young innovators fair we're right over on the other side of the wall and we've got a great little section where we have some custom lego tables that I designed for this place that fold up for classrooms I designed them to be with classrooms in mind so that they fold up into nice little boxes to lay inside the classroom but they fold out to be full size standard tables so we've got tons of lego for them to play with over there we have one of our teachers Monica who is a NASA certified teacher she's doing a whole thing with lasagna and noodles and everything else doing engineering with all that stuff engineering with pasta that's exactly what it is we have a VR set up so the kids can watch from google I love that app it's great little tip don't have too many lights on apparently heavy lights affected we found that out yesterday so we turned the lights off for us over there and now we're great we have a cardboard challenge so come over and build what you want out of whatever I have a ton of cardboard over there for people to come over and build we also have a whole section dedicated to dollar store stem that's kind of what we call it that sounds like my budget that's exactly what it is so dollar store stem is great we spent about 80 bucks at the dollar store down the street yesterday because that way we didn't have to transport it and we set up a whole bunch of little challenges and puzzles marble runs like helicopters and stuff sure you can you can buy fully made stuff but we want kids to be able to come in and just build it themselves and that's what they're doing it's a great little thing it's a big section that they give us over there so people can just come in not only about buying anything or getting a sales pitch there just coming in to create which is great that's what we want them to do innovate with those fun tools that you've got over there those tools and learning thank you so much for joining us this morning thank you stopping by I'm going to look into what you're doing at the Maker Depot Academy thank you have a great day it looks like there's a nice gentleman in a tie to our left who's up next come on up on the stage sir we have the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education coming up right now we have a gentleman on it wait, are you here? come back, come back, why are you leaving? I have to take a break a very quick one I'll be back, but you just take it to the mic hi there, so this is This Week in Science welcome to the Young Innovators Fair everyone we are here to talk talking with the innovators here today and look who's here Justin's arrived alright so we are This Week in Science and we have another guest from the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education and your name? my name is Nanda Mitra-Idle I'm the president on page actually so yeah, and we're really excited to be here this is the first year we're participating and we're exhibiting over there so we're very excited to be a part of such an important event for our kids absolutely, so can you tell us a little bit about your organization and what you're doing here at the fair? sure, I'd love to be a part of Gifted, it is responsible for advocating for our gifted kids we work at three different levels we work with districts and parents of course to help provide proper programming and making sure that everyone has appropriate training to kind of get our kids to where they need to go but we also work with the state Pennsylvania is something that is mandated but it's non-funded mandate so it's something that districts don't have a lot of money for and so it's not necessarily a priority and one of the other keys with Gifted is that there's not a lot of training done for educators with Gifted when they're in their pre-service training so when they're getting ready to prep for their programs less than three percent of teachers actually get any training on who our gifted kids are and how to teach them so what happens is they get into schools and very little is given post training they don't really know who our kids are they make assumptions that it's not their fault but they make assumptions like our kids don't need any help they do fine without anything that they're going to be teacher pleasers so and these are things that are not true with our kids they need to be challenged and grown they say 60 percent of our gifted kids are visual spatial learners which is your organization is perfect here because their hands on their science they like to learn schools tend to be verbal based math and reading and we tend to identify kids that can speak really well and have those verbal skills but our visual spatial kiddos tend to be missed a lot so we tend to help with that as well here we're here because this is a huge opportunity for us to meet parents and people a lot of these kids are visual spatial kiddos they have these talents and areas that we're trying to help develop and then if we don't develop them the consequences are pretty dire for some of our kids so let's talk a little bit more about that why is it so important to first of all identify gifted students and then provide extra support for them it's a great question identification is important because in order to address the needs and providing for proper programming you have to identify what the needs are and our gifted kids some of them tend to be so high traditional assessments in the classroom can identify them because the ceilings are too low so for example if you have kids I have had quite a few kids that are gifted mathematically or gifted musically but what tends to happen is the ceiling is so low they look too high but you don't know how high they can go my bro sport found case what I had was there was a little kid first grade he identified him but he was on a fifth grade level in math so but he was a quite shy kid so he would just sit there and once he was identified they didn't know how to teach him he knew more math than his classroom teacher said and he could figure it out because he was just he could think mathematically so we had to provide but because the teachers and everyone were willing to work with us he was identified he was given programming and the programming meant he had to have another gifted student from the high school come to teach him which was really wonderful of the district to do that and what a great experience for that high school student that came in as well I come from a small town with a university really high per capita Ph.D. parents in the school system so our school system and the parents were always very aware of what the capability of the students were and I had a a classmate who by the time we got to high school was taking advanced mathematics at the local university because he had surpassed what was possible for the teachers to teach so we and I can I can imagine that kid who also this is the same guy when I'm working on my in metal shop and I'm trying to grind the top of the door so little clothes because I cut it wrong has got a 16 scale jet engine that he's built on the next table and it works they fired it up it work so but I can imagine if he didn't if he wasn't happened to be dropped into this school system where they had the flexibility to send the kid to the university next door there's no way he would have achieved everything that he's he's been able to do and this is a visual spatial world I mean the careers opportunities out there are for those type of kiddos even though we don't traditional public schools might not do a good job of finding and identifying them unless you have parents and parents have more sway and more control over district curriculum than teachers do because teachers are under the purview of the principals and administrators and only have so much they have a parents can really advocate for their child and help to push districts that may not have those resources for to help grow the kids and without growing the kids they develop a fixed mindset which means they think their intelligence is fixed so they're not going to strive they give up easily but gifted kids that are any kid that's providing with appropriate programming that's challenging especially with those type of kids they go to more challenging universities they tend to have higher grades and most importantly at least to me they have higher life satisfaction I had a middle school kid who was properly identified once he told me he likes being with other gifted kids because he gets to nerd out there's no stigma talking about what he likes absolutely yes you get to kind of be a nerd I had a gifted girl in math who pretended not to be gifted mathematically at the high school level except when she was in those certain courses that she got to express herself because it was okay yeah so Kiki was just talking about earlier how she was really good at math when she was younger and she she loved doing math but eventually she was pretty bored in class the response from the teacher was to just give her more work more of the same right and so she ended up not liking math at a certain point because it became extra work so it's almost like you're being penalized for being smart and they don't know how to challenge you so either you're left bored or overworked at things you already know how to do I actually give I give my kids a 15 minute time limit for each subject I don't let them go beyond that and I wrote a note to the teacher I'm like this is how much time I'm giving them and if it's beyond that even if it hasn't completed all of you and what and we were into something very similar to what you're describing because she loved from seven years old loved math it was her by far her favorite thing and she got she was telling me all of a sudden Matt in third grade math is boring how did that happen that was your favorite thing and it was just like you're saying it was repetitive and she got it and was ready to do something more challenging yeah what's the next step and once we talked to the teachers and said hey she's saying she's bored can you see what's going on and they found out oh okay she's totally ready to go on to the they switched her class math class right so what is it that you're doing now to support these teachers to give them the tools that they need to support the gifted children well there's a couple of different steps that we're doing at the state level we have one of our board members is a legislative committee and when she does she works with senators and she works with congressmen and people at the state level PDE the Pennsylvania Department of Education to kind of help work with to get gifted in where it should be going so one of the things that was recently done is to get teachers training so now teachers can get training and get a credential on the certificate for it so that kind of encourages them to kind of get that training you know we're working on trying to getting a person in a position now because right now there's a hiring freeze for the gifted position so we're trying to get that kind of work with the state and getting that done at the local level we provide speakers to districts so if a district doesn't have an affiliate the affiliate which is either parents or districts they would like a free speaker you know we can give them one so we have a list of people that are willing to come so we can provide training we have board members that go into districts on their own time because we're very passionate and we will go in and we will work with districts we'll help with GIPs and we'll do trainings you know on identification we go around we try to go around in conferences and to educate so we really try our best to support those parents and teachers you know and whatever they need we'll kind of provide the best that we can but I guess the sales job of it is that we're a non-profit and it requires money most of us will do it on we'll try to use it on our own dime but we're not rich in our educators there's not much money in it so we have so membership is important you know not only for the membership dollars to help provide the resources across the state especially to states like maybe in western PA and places that maybe have the more spread out and so they really need someone they have fewer access to resources but I think more importantly it helps us when we advocate at the state level to say this is how many people that we have that care about gifted and this is why it's important to have someone in that position why it's important to ask make sure the districts provide training to teachers so they know that they're who their kids are there's a huge population and gifted of under identified kids so kids that are actually African and Latino are poor kids that aren't even identified all together and that really need us to speak up but when I do presentations and I talk to districts about it they just don't know like oh I didn't know that was a problem in our district and they're more than willing to help but they need training and they need people to help provide resources and that's what our organization can do our clientele are the kids you know and we just work with everyone to help understand our kids absolutely what great work so what are you doing here at the innovators fair you're you have a table we do have a table right over there across kind of from the Osborn table we're here to kind of help people know what's going on with gifted education we're here to let them know about our organization I've had several people come up I'll just answer personal questions that they have and this gets members excellent and so if someone wanted to help support your program or find out more we would look for a Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education page right and you can go to their booth to find out more thank you so much thank you I hope you have a great rest of your day thanks excellent thanks alright we are this weekend science we have a lot of different guests coming up to our stage throughout the rest of the morning and afternoon we'll also be on the lab rat stage at 1.30 doing a science quiz show all based on stories that we have covered on this weekend science unimaginable value Justin they've so alright what are you working on on your computer there Justin I know I was working on what you're doing today but coming up next we have Odyssey of the Mind coming in at 11 real young right 99 people are watching oh sorry people are watching everything it was password one the password to everything someone's going to get in my laptop okay so at 11 o'clock we have Odyssey of the Mind coming in sorry I went to sleep right as I was reading the lineup at 11.15 we have Mad Science in New Jersey coming up on the stage at 11.30 we'll have the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School 11.45 we have Michael Carroll coming up discussing raising young innovators nice I'd like to know how to raise an innovator I saw you talking to Darth Vader that's right I was talking with Darth Vader just a few moments ago he says he's a big fan of twists and has been listening for years no now Darth Vader is a fan of twists yeah what do you think the whole idea for the Death Star game from that's true listening to twists well I heard that was a long time ago and it was far far away though well actually it was in a galaxy far far away but time and space it's a relative thing that's actually happening now yeah it's sort of everybody welcome to the young innovators fair this is this weekend science here and we are talking about science all day long we are interviewing innovators who are here sharing their innovations their science their technology with you maybe we can give you a little deeper dive into some of these exhibits that are here then you would get just walking past also this weekend science is a weekly science news podcast we broadcast online live each Wednesday night at 8pm pacific time which is 11pm eastern time so maybe a little past your kids bedtimes but for you grownups it would be a lot of fun plus you can download us on iTunes you can download our podcast on iTunes you can subscribe to us you can subscribe to us on Spreaker we're also on SoundCloud we're on Facebook we're on Twitter we are on all sorts of podcasts we catchers what Flickr what's a Flickr I haven't been on Flickr forever Flickr I thought that was a isn't that a photo sure thing yeah Stitcher Stitcher if you use Stitcher we're also on Google Play so if you use an android device you can use the Google Play podcast portal to find us as well we're all over the place if you look for our podcast this week in Science you will find us and find your preferred method of involving us in your lives that's right yeah so it's 11am here is it actually 11am yes okay I think your computer updated I manually updated I went into data time preferences and I added in Philadelphia time yeah we're from the west coast so we're a little confused as to what time it is generally so right now according to all of our bodies it's 8am that's right I woke up once again at 4am 3am in the morning okay this is the young innovators fair I think we have some people waiting to come around you don't have to climb no giant no stumbles and falls it's pretty easy for you and Gabe one of the organizers, founders of this fair is roller skating around he's got roller skates on his feet to get around this giant facility to make it easy welcome thank you for joining us this morning absolutely so tell me a little bit about yourself introduce yourself please my name is Laura I'm a teacher with the YMCA out of Holidaysburg Pennsylvania so we do a lot of programming with kids before and after school and we do a lot of steam focused activities so this fair is absolutely amazing but I'm also here with Odyssey of the Mind which is the program we're trying to get into different schools and everything throughout the country I have this recollection of Odyssey of the Mind I think I might have it has it been around for a long time I think I may have been involved in it as a child even excuse me Odyssey of the Mind began in 1978 alright then it's very possible it was founded by Dr. Sam Miklis who at the time was an industrial design professor at Rowan State University in New Jersey here in the state of Pennsylvania we have been active in Odyssey since 1979 so we've been around a long time it's a creative problem solving program for school students K through college right and so what kinds of problems are solved what kind of activities are done in this program the sky is the limit here we publish a new vehicle problem this past year kids had to build vehicles that were small in size and had to accomplish tasks next year the kids will have to build a vehicle that they can ride on or in and accomplish tasks problem number two is always a technical mechanical problem so think a device that accomplishes tasks this past year the kids had to build a robot that mimicked human actions oh wow that's interesting that would be very tricky the tricky part is the budget in other words the maximum money that they're allowed to spend on what the judges see during their 8 minute presentation was $135 wow so this is a completely different budget say than first robotics absolutely which it's basically however much money you can get to build your bot this is where a team of up to 7 kids are in a situation where they create something like the people that created the first lego system you're starting at the very beginning if you will you have dollars to spend seven people coming up with ideas and trying to solve a problem right so problem number three every year is founded in classic something classic art, classic literature, archaeology something like this problem four every year is an engineering problem kids have to build a structure using nothing but eighth inch square pieces of balsa wood the structure when it's all finished can't weigh any more than 15 grams imagine doing something like this we had yes and then you have these projects but then you go to a competition and different schools bring their teams and everybody competes against each other there's two portions to the competition that day there's the long term portion which Bill just described it's the eight minute presentation of the problem that they have chosen and they've had several months to prepare so they have that $135 budget to design backdrops, props, costumes anything that they're going to be using during that presentation anything that's visible to the judges so we really push the kids to use recycled materials they use stuff like trash bags and newspapers anything that you can find to make something amazing out of virtually nothing the second part of the competition is spontaneous the kids have no idea what that portion is going to be until they walk into a secluded room here that day and they're presented with a problem that they have to solve in a matter of minutes so they practice and learn everybody's strengths and weaknesses over those couple of months and in that moment they have to decide who their top five participants are going to be they might have to construct something out of toothpicks and tape and paper that holds so much weight so it's we really like them to think creatively think out of the box and we really challenge them to kind of push the envelope during the competition day and you really have to know your team members strengths and weaknesses to know who for this particular problem is going to have the skill set required to be able to make it happen teamwork is a huge aspect of Odyssey the Mind we want the kids to learn how to communicate with one another we want them to learn how to develop that sense of teamwork that they can take with them out into schools, out into the community in their future jobs that really critical thinking aspect of it we're not going to allow them to have a phone or a tablet or computer to come up with the answers for them it's all them, it's all from their minds it's what they come up with through their imagination were you going to say something in relation to that as well I just want to make the point that what makes Odyssey the Mind unique and important is the fact that only the kids on the team can have anything to do with the solutions that they create they have to decide based on the team make up which problem they want to tackle and then conceive of design and execute a solution mom, dad can't help no grandma, grandpa you go to a science fair and dad built a volcano doesn't fly I just went my son is in kindergarten and I just went this year to the schools science fair his first science fair they did a classroom project because he's in kindergarten but there were all the grade levels presenting their projects there and I walked through and it was like the mom presenting this child the father presenting this child and I'm like why isn't the kid sitting here presenting their own science project that's a dangerous precedent why does it definitely look like parents handwriting and not child's handwriting what is going on here no helicopter parents allowed absolutely not, it's all up to the kids I think that's wonderful because it gets the kids really to rely on their own abilities it gets them to rely on their team members and so it gets the kids to actually learn responsibility to their team mates the responsibility to the project following through on something conceiving like you said of a solution and going through the process to actually iterating and getting it done there's a lot learned in the entire process leading up to competition there's trial and error there's failure and we've seen it on competition day too not everything is going to go 100% according to plan some of the kids get sick and can't come on competition day a prop falls down in the middle of a performance and these kids really rely on one another to make the best out of what situation they have and we've actually seen teams who flourish under pressure it happened to me as a kid we had props fall down in our own performances and the one who didn't really want to be in the play they didn't want a speaking part they didn't want to be front and center but they were more of an analytical thinker and kind of behind the scenes builder we all froze and she came up with a line on the spot that made it seem like the prop falling was part of the performance nobody would have known any better our parents are in the audience losing it but the judges would never know they had no idea absolute improvisation exactly I came into Odyssey through my youngest daughter she came home in second grade and said dad you're going to be a judge I'm going to what now well that was 25 years ago which should give you some indication of the value that I see in Odyssey of the mind and the difference it made in the lives of two of my daughters what do you do what do you do normal is this what you do full time or is it my full time job was commercial contracting so you're a builder you're a maker but this is kind of outside the usual this would have been outside your usual work day kind of stuff yes and no yeah contractors are creative problem solvers for sure they're problem solvers exactly as Laura mentioned nothing ever goes completely according to plan and one of the things that's important how is this wall a quarter inch off that's just an oops in Odyssey failure is not an obstacle it's an opportunity nice Thomas Edison once said I now know 2000 ways to not make a light bulb okay it's about perseverance Colonel Sanders the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken literally 1000 rejections before he got in a restaurant to offer his chicken for free so all of these things are important aspects of Odyssey of the mind one of the areas that's part of my passion for Odyssey is the broad range of students who can be very successful in an Odyssey team absolutely I hear every year of teams who have had special needs I prefer to call them differently abled not special needs but differently abled kids who begin the year very out of the community and by the end of the year they're just the opposite they're almost the center of the community and they're participating so that is very important to me some schools offer Odyssey just through their gifted program which I argue with anybody I come across does that but most schools offer it to anybody interested which I think it should be you should give everybody the opportunity if they want to take it to test their abilities to train themselves in a new way to stretch their boundaries and open up new possibilities and the more learning styles that we see on individual teams the stronger the team you have your analytical thinkers you have your comedians you have your performers but every kid has a place on one of these teams because they have some special talent or some gift that adds to the overall performance to the overall team and it just makes it that much more of an inclusive program to offer to kids so what do you have here and where can people find you here at the young innovators fair we are in the next portion of the expo center actually right in the food court so anybody who wants to come grab a bite to eat you can't miss us we have grab a bite to eat solve a creative problem exactly what's going on probably the only exhibitor here who has an edible problem we offer what we call a spontaneous problem where you can build a structure using only toothpicks and marshmallows to hold up a cup of fruit loops so if you're successful with your structure you get to take your marshmallows and fruit loops and have a munchy if you don't eat all the marshmallows during the construction process we've seen some of those and parents we apologize for the sugar in the fruit loops but sometimes it has to be done the kids get to have fun thank you so much for joining us thank you for having us behind her from my own childhood I'm suddenly having these memories come back of this competition that I was in absolutely I remember weighing my balsa wood bridge the structure that we had to build I remember having to weigh it there's also all kinds of opportunities for former OMERS to get involved as volunteers I think I also painted we had to paint a picture I think I painted something in the style of Mary Cassatt the arts thing we had a few different things all kinds of different stuff Odyssey of the Mind Odyssey of the Mind aligns with and supports all of the four major buzzword curriculums STEM, STEAM, Common Core 21st century it's cross-curriculum for any curriculum teachers can use the Odyssey of the Mind problems in school and have nobody compete you don't have to do that you can just use them absolutely so it can be educational or kids can compete have a wonderful afternoon thanks for being here great to meet you too this is This Week in Science welcome to the Young Innovators Fair it is 1117 Young Innovators Fair it's ongoing we have Mad Science next Mad Science is going to join us here on the stage. Mad Science is a personal favorite of mine so I'm excited about this conversation oh you've brought you've brought props oh we like I love props I want to move just a computer we can move the Chromebook out of the way props are always good all right props are props are being arranged on our table here this is This Week in Science we are a science news podcast but we're here at the Young Innovators Fair talking with various innovators about the things they've brought right now please introduce yourself my name is Radio Active Rick Radio Active Rick I'm from New Jersey so my son kindergartener has been involved in the Mad Science program at his school this year that school does he go to? it's in Portland, Oregon that's out of our jurisdiction but as the Mad Scientist do you have to come up with a fun alliterative name for yourself? yes when you first get the job at the company they ask you to pick a Mad Science name and they even give you a list of science words and I went through all the words that started with the letter R and I just thought Radio Active Rick just sounded really nice I think it's fabulous you're a little bit dangerous radioactivity like Spider-Man I don't know can you climb walls? I cannot but maybe science will help us with that one day I'm still hoping for my gecko finger gloves yes I'm still waiting for our flying cars there we go I promise I don't know we have airplanes so explain a little bit about the Mad Science program for us please Mad Science offers a lot of different programs we offer after school classes before school classes, preschool workshops corporate events we do private birthday parties we do we do events at schools and libraries and for any number of groups of people any number of kids small as 15 or less or schools where they do assemblies for 300 children we do a lot of take your child to work days we go to companies and we entertain so all different kinds of events what kinds of what kinds of activities do you do what is the goal of these events what are you doing while you're there different events we have different goals most of it is entertainment but of course we want the kids to learn we want them to have fun and we want them to learn and we want them to get interested in science so if it's a big event if it's something at a company or library that's usually a 45 minute show and it's just a really big fun show with lots of visuals and lots of interaction we do a lot of stuff and volunteer and that's a lot of fun and then if we do something like an after school program that's usually a weekly program where we'll go to a school once a week and it'll be a different topic each week a different scientific topic so for example we have all the different topics we do for after school things like that and just well so many different subjects the kids can learn yeah I know my son they did the recent one science of like movies and rock and roll so they brought some real pop culture reference into they made flip books for movies to talk about the one called all about animals all about animals Blair loves animals lasers, chemistry laser, forgot me at laser all kinds of awesome stuff so you have brought a prop with you I brought a prop one of the fun things we're doing at our booth over there I bought a prop that uses some dry ice I love dry ice I brought my glove here you don't want to pick up dry ice I have some big chunks dry ice is liquid it is solid solid it is frozen carbon dioxide I'm just running on caffeine I'm lack of sleep right now it's negative 109 degrees so you cannot touch it with your bare hands it would freeze your skin in graduate school I decided I don't need a glove you can touch it very quickly but usually you'll end up with a little burn that kills the skin you can touch it for 2 seconds after that it starts to hurt but I brought this cool prop with me take this off cool things with the kids we put some in some hot water hot water it will sublimate which means it turns from a solid to a gas so it sublimate very very quickly looks awesome doesn't it and then we put this crazy looking contraption on the top oh my goodness it's like a smoke thrower two different fun things first of all with the kids we were putting it on their heads getting them a nice carbon dioxide shower that's right and then the other cool thing is I have some bubble solution the kind you use to blow bubbles with although I might have to wait for this to slow down a little bit it's coming out fairly fast it's coming out very fast I might have to wait for this to slow down for a second as this is coming out very quickly I'll tell one of my stories related to dry ice and little closed containers I don't want to do that what's happening is you're seeing the gas come out because it's building up gas inside and increasing the pressure the fact that it has an open end the pressure is being released and the smoke is coming out if you were to take a little tiny bit of dry ice and add a drop of water and put it into a little tiny vial and close the top and shake it up and then throw it down the hallway in your academic institution it explodes with a really loud bang everybody comes out of their offices to see what happened that's probably frowned upon it's frowned upon so you run academics oh grad students see if I can get some in here it's coming out fast I can make bubbles but it's coming out so fast there we go we are making some carbon dioxide bubbles carbon dioxide bubbles and when they pop I'm loving this so much I can try to get it to land in your hair maybe a little bit there we go bubbles in the hair that's pretty cool we can make a giant bubble right there look at the size of that one oh are these unpoppable bubbles? so they are bubbles filled with carbon dioxide bubbles and pop them very cool one of my favorite things to do with carbon dioxide that's awesome isn't it we're doing that over at our mad science booth along with lots of other experiments we have electricity we have a vandagraph generator oh those are fun we're making super bouncy balls over there the super bouncy balls that's something the kids can probably take home with them take it home with them that's pretty cool isn't it you can't go wrong with dry ice it's awesome and dry ice it'll I'm thinking liquid nitrogen liquid nitrogen is much cooler great for making ice cream so are you performing live in addition to the video? oh yes I am at two o'clock I'm performing live on the main stage right down there I'm doing about a half hour long mad science show it involves some of the dry ice it involves the vandagraph generator to make static electricity a couple cool other surprises so if anybody is still around at two o'clock come on over and watch the mad science show I think that would be so it's a lot of fun and if people are interested in the mad science school program or birthday parties is there a website there is a website it is madscienceofnj.com or madscience.org either one of those and I have to say my son has been involved in the mad science after school program and he loves it he comes home with his projects and tells me all about them and he's like mommy I'm going to be a scientist or an engineer or an artist or maybe a doctor he can be all of them absolutely thank you so much for bringing this it was such a fun demonstration oh the things you can do with pvc pipe and some dry ice exactly thank you for having me thank you very much this was so fun everybody this is this week in science we are weekly science news podcast we are here today talking with innovators from the young innovators fair about all the things that they are doing here and in the world at large don't miss mad science and their booth all sorts of projects and activities and a live performance at two o'clock have fun too oh my goodness those bubbles were great I want those in my house can I have bubbles in my house that pop and smoke I just want a smoke machine in my house yes yes wait what happened I missed it Justin how you doing over there how did the gack solidify is it still soft still looking slimy isn't it the same it's slightly different formula gack slime come on up we got some more guests come on take the stairs walk we have another guest coming up to join us right now awesome oh I'm really happy yesterday we were like yesterday was our figure out how it works and today it's much more smooth I'm very happy today up real close and talk directly this mic for some reason is quieter than the rest I'm okay with that I'm not I want to hear your lovely voice alright everybody this is this week in science who are you can you please introduce yourselves to us I am Kay Hallumbach and I have Emily and Telecato here and we are from Pennsylvania leadership charter school and today we are talking about what we're doing in the booth and who we are as a school nice so the leadership charter school your charter school and we are online mostly so we are our students are online at their homes and our teachers are online in a main office based in Westchester and so our students meet through a computer virtual classroom virtual chat so one of the things we're highlighting today is that even though it is virtual we still get to do a lot of science in the home and we still get to do a lot of science online through those virtual chats and it's you still get to do stuff is kind of how I've been saying it right so what kind of activities are you what are you doing here at the young innovators fair what's your what's your aim here so we brought along this you've got insects yes we do so we brought along some of our class pets yes they're not cute and furry they're cute they're cute in their own way okay I will take that back I mean I'm a biologist by training so this is a Madagascar hissing cockroach it's about two to three inches long or so so it's a rather large bug and it's on your arm yes it is they're flightless they don't bite and they are not the type of cockroach that you would find in your home so where I say that you do find these in your homes you either move to Africa or something has gone very very well in your home right are they I mean Madagascar hissing cockroach originally from Madagascar yes and I also like to say that I have Madagascar silent cockroaches because mine very rarely hiss only when they're mad when this handled so I've heard this sound before and I've seen one of these in a sleeping bag in a sleeping bag somebody gave me a sleeping bag and then it made a noise and when I went to investigate this is what came out of it I was pretty surprised could you imitate the noise yeah it's kind of like a noise because normally they would live in Madagascar they would live in the bottom of the jungle they'd live in the underbrush and they would kind of make that noise as like a thread or like hey I'm here it's stuff on me kind of thing right we have a whole colony of these guys I have about 60 they hatched one egg brood all at once and about so I started with three adults and I now have 60 how long did that take how often did they breed that was by pure chance that was just by pure luck I didn't intend to have so many but I brought them home almost overnight they actually laid an egg case and that was in February so the babies we watched them grow up that must be a wonderful learning experience for your students to be able to observe the life cycle watch the adults and then the babies and the eggs and see how they progress in their development we have a webcam on then 24-7 so our students can log in at any time we have some other animals we have a webcam as well but it was actually really cool one of them yesterday shed so I got to teach about how their skeleton is on the outside exoskeleton so when they want to grow they need to shed their exoskeleton and it's pretty incredible because it looks like they're just sort of ripping themselves in half and then emerging from it and when they emerge they are white because the new exoskeleton inside hasn't hardened and darkened so it looks like this white ghost alien is emerging from a cockroach it's kind of surreal and then you have a shell left behind how often does it happen I don't know I've only caught a handful of the babies doing it I've never seen one of the adults doing it this guy is a traveler he's just climbing around on you you have a Militia he's a giant African millipede and this is a juvenile so he's still a little baby close to her so he's still a baby and he just kind of does his own thing we don't get to see much of them he has a brother so this is Millie and Vanilly is at the booth Millie and Vanilly, that's cute so they just kind of burrow lip-sinkers do these animals really have a thousand legs? they do not we did some research with the kids and that's one of the things they had to look up and this one has about 500 feet in count we're estimating obviously but this is also still growing so it very well could get up to that once it reaches adulthood so how long will this millipede be this is a baby so their average life span is about 7 years 7 years for an insect that's amazing I had no idea and so by how long does it take to grow to full size honestly I don't remember I don't remember wow we don't get to see much of them they're just kind of burrowers and they don't really come out very often yeah so they are sort of like the cockroaches there to try to voice I think I'm adding an extra syllable in there but basically what they do is they also kind of live in the underbrush of the jungle of the forest and they would eat all the dead decaying material so both of their natural inclinations is to hide and be burrowed quite deep and are they more nocturnal in their activity? so one of the other insects we have at the booth are best beetles and those are they come out around about 4 o'clock in their log and they're in their enclosure so we see them more than we see the millipedes and so the kids do the kids help take care of these animals? but they can't because it's a virtual classroom so you're managing this and then putting cameras on the enclosures we have the students who occasionally they'll ask how are they doing can they see them they're kind of interested like what do they eat so we can get them on the webcam in the class and kind of talk about them and when I meet with my 8th grade students we get them out, we play with them during our virtual lessons which we meet twice a week so the kids get to see them every week alright so the kids can actually observe them, track their behavior I'm just staring at this millipede as it wraps itself like a bracelet around your wrist it's quite a fashionable bracelet we also have some lizards here today at our booth and at our school we have two leopard geckos some anoles so for that we talk about different habitats how the leopard geckos are desert climate habitat and how anoles are more a humid jungle type environments so we use that to handle the animals so we like to say that we're still giving our students an authentic science lab experience still get to engage with science we have a lot of focus on home experiments things they can do in their home and still have that science lab experience even though they're not in a physical building with us oh no, I'm sure there's plenty of tubaware missing from the from the kitchen a lot of kids out in the backyard trying to track down we have one of our teachers who wants to start a worm farm so she's putting together some information about how to go back in your backyard and dig up worms and start your own worm farm and I'm sure with somebody especially the cockroaches I'm sure parents are very glad that it is online only and not in a physical classroom but we have a treat for you guys today if you want to engage with us because one of the other things we're doing at our booth is inviting students I'm not drinking cockroach dropping so we're inviting some of the students and anybody who drops by to eat a bug so as we are science teachers it is our natural inclination to talk about sustainability and what's good for the environment and the fact that as the world loses good farming ground we're all going to be eating insects yes exactly and insects are actually a much better source of nutrients and protein than meat yes they are and it doesn't always have to be that you're eating a bug one of the most popular things that they do with crickets is they ground them up and they turn them into flour so then you can make pasta with cricket flour and you still have that protein rich meal without actually the thought of eating a cricket with the legs and everything but protein flour I've even seen you can get to raise the crickets right there in the kitchen and sort of pluck them out it's an amazing protein source in a very urban dense environment especially Asia where they already have a culture of bug eating and they also have just sort of a dense community it's easy to have a Tupperware container in your closet and have this protein source to farm rather than having a cow in your backyard so I realize that this is a very mixed message because we just showed you a cockroach and a millipede and now we're going to ask you to eat a bug so we're not eating our class pets but these are going to be dried mealworm larva and they I was going to say I can let you experience it or I can kind of tell you what to expect if you need to well I'm going to save mine for Blair because I feel bad that she didn't save it for Blair I have an extra there's one for all of us Justin so we can say we already did it so cheers in the name of science bug eating I was going to get the crunch on the microphone I got the crunchy and salty that's really good that is tasty I kind of like to describe it as sort of like a salty was nutty like a sunflower seed almost like it's just dried and crunchy and salty like a popcorn kernel too there's veggie fries yes I know what you might get like a veggie fry bug fry mealworm fry I'm here to say that if you go over to the Pennsylvania leadership charter school booth and you can eat a bug and it tastes really good thank you for having us absolutely thank you so much for bringing all these fun things I was going to say report back to how Blair does I'll leave one here for you awesome what do you have a website where people can find you so it's palx.org palx palcs.org thank you very much have a great afternoon I hope you get lots of people to eat bugs now the hissing cockroach in the backpack was Ted who was one of the original hosts it got to Japan and came back I don't know if it was a Japanese version but being that it was Japan it might have been somebody's pet and he was probably staying in hostels and maybe gained a pet maybe but it was quite a surprise I heard it first I heard the hissing at me first oh my goodness looks like we've got some more guests hang on I'm going to be picking those little bug legs out from between my teeth for the rest of the day oh my goodness this is this week in science everyone online I hope you are enjoying the show and we are joined by some new guests now we've got a we have to speak speak right into the mic wonderful thank y