3M Super Science Saturday
Standing in foreground, Talen Rabe shines a 150-watt bulb down onto soap bubbles. When viewed thru our diffraction grating (rainbow) glasses, the light is like a swarm of Disney pixies! Photos courtesy of Marium Asif.
Since 2008 the University of Wisconsin–River Falls (UWRF) SPS chapter has been participating in the 3M Super Science Saturday, a program for children whose relatives work at the company.
Groups such as the Minnesota Herpetological Society and the 3M Visiting Wizards participated and showed off their outreach activities. We had an SPS booth with four hands-on activities! We brought our department’s very fancy infrared camera to show people what they look like in the infrared and demonstrated how to measure temperatures from a distance. A big flat-screen display made this visually appealing.
Kathleen Miller-Chell and Tye Williams coach a young man in how to use the spinning wheel on the platform to experience angular momentum.
We also gave away UWRF Physics Rainbow glasses, and had a great time showing everyone what bright light reflected off a soap bubble looks like when viewed through a diffraction grating. We had Bristlebot kits that let children mount a pager vibrator on a toothbrush head and watch it scoot around! Finally, we had our ever-popular angular momentum demos with a weighted bicycle wheel and a spinning platform. Some kids really understood how to describe rotation as “spin up” or “spin down” instead of counterclockwise or clockwise. //
