- ESF Sustainability: Which uses the least energy? A laptop, fan, or LED desk lamp? ESF’s new Energy Manager (and alum) Michael Amadori measured the electricity required to use all these household items. Kids also played Wasketball, sorting common household waste into trash and recycling and used (with supervision!) solar power as a campfire starter. They also had a sneek peak at our in-house power station.
- Color changing chemistry! Chemistry’s Kate Bailie (and graduate student assistants) helped students with simple acid-base reactions; use salt water, aluminum foil, and a complete circuit to create a temporary “ink”, and assembled teeny temperature sensitive LCDs
- All about Maple. Which maples for syrup? (Any, but sugar has the best yield) What do the buds look like? The inside of a tree? With alumna Jill Rahn of ESF Forest Properties.
- Something's Fishy: tracing mercury. Details are important in science! What can we measure? Kids received instructions, and then helped Environmental Biology faculty member, Environmental Toxicologist Dr. Roxanne Razavi and grad students Abby Webster and Mike Ackland with record keeping, measured length and weight of whole yellow perch and (with careful supervision) retrieved otoliths (tiny ear bones that can be used to age the fish, much like rings in a tree), eye lenses, and a piece of dorsal fin. These fish are part of an ongoing study, Project Breathless. The samples, along with many others, will be assessed by grad students and faculty to help trace mercury through the sample population’s habitat. Kids and volunteers thought yellow wasn’t an apt description, and that they should be called apricot perch. A few Kids thought this the grossest of the activities, but others really enjoyed being part of active research!
- In the Lego® Bridge Challenge, Kids were tasked with planning (on paper) and then building (with Lego®) wide enough for Thomas the Tank Engine™ (or friend) to use, and allow 2 matchbox™ car wide lanes beneath. How much weight can it support? How few bricks can you use? (More bricks=higher materials and labor cost). With ESF Environmental Resources Engineering’s Karen Karker (planning support by Lindi Quackenbush).
- Building an Urban Ecosystem. What are the components of a park (or community garden)? Kids working on the park explain their choices to ESF grad student and Open Academy staff members Dan Collins and Maura Harling Stefl. Through this, they realized park spaces will be hot. So they added a snack shack, water stations and shade. These introduce a new challenge: how to deal with the trash?
- Chemistry students David Spector and John Pezzulo ended the day with a Super Cool “Cooking” Demo, emphasizing safe handling of liquid nitrogen. While Kids (and volunteers) enjoyed some of the best strawberry and vanilla ice cream (served in low-waste waffle cone bowls) ever, John shared a secret: that if really like what you are learning, and work hard, colleges might pay them to continue learning about that field through graduate school stipends and tuition waivers, and work in support of teaching and/or research.
Kids Day is one of the earliest, and most enduring, programs of ESF's Women's Caucus. For a photo journey of the day, visit https://www.facebook.com/ESFKidsDay/; for information about past programs, please visit https://www.esf.edu/womenscaucus/kids.htm.
Acknowledgments: A huge Thank you to presentation teams for their time and supplies, and the many others who set up spaces, background checked and provided training to volunteers; Allison Oakes, John Turbeville, Brad Fierke, Linda McGuigan, Kathy Lang and Kelly Berger who got everyone where they needed to be; Diane Jaramillo for hep at registration; Danielle Gerhart, Nichole Doherty and Steve Waldron who helped serve lunch and chaperoned restroom trips; and Doherty for checking kids back to their adults. Thanks are also due to James Zappola, Gentry Battaglia and Ilsa Dohner of the Trailhead Café for their lunch preparations, and to the Provost’s Office and the Women’s Caucus for covering these expenses and snacks. Gratitude to the Bookstore and Centennial Hall for day end gifts to Kids.
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