In November 2013 First grade students from the Benjamin Franklin Magnet school, part of the Academy of Glendale were treated to a day of science at the Caltech Chemistry Department.
The school is focused on teaching international foreign languages, so this was an excellent opportunity for the students to be exposed to and learn a bit more about what the excitment of chemistry. Many of the Stoltz group members helped to design and guide the students through the experiments and demonstrations, Nick O'Connor and Chris Haley, both CCHF members and Katerina Korch, Beau Pritchett, Jonny Gordon and Jeff Holder all helped make this an exciting day of science.
Hands on activities for the students included anti-gravity machines, liquid nitrogen demo's, carbonate volcano's and water splitting demonstrations. Concepts such as catalysis and reactivity, some of the core theories involved in the CCHF were explored and explained to both the children and their parents.
The water splitting demo was performed by students from another CCI Center, CCI Solar who are based at Caltech and focus on the development of new technologies to harness and harvest the energy from the sun.
The students also saw soda rockets, took a tour of a leading scientific campus, explored the turtle pond and learnt jellyfish propulsion! A visit to the Biological Propulsion lab, led by Prof. John Dabiri, gave the students a chance to find out more about the lessons the researchers are learning from the how jellyfish propell themselves through the water and how this can be applied to the next generation of aquatic locomotion, fluid dynamic energy conversion and cardiac flows.