One thing I find humorous about having this event happening in Orange County is that I actually happen to live in Orange County, California, small world!
After finishing my finals on the 3rd of August, I did some light packing, went to bed, and the next morning, was helping Susan pack the Cornell fleet vehicle full of all sorts of materials that we would be using on the subsequent day, I was pretty surprised at how effectively everything really fit into the vehicle, as it honestly was quite a lot of stuff! Susan and I got to spend much of the drive over talking about miscellaneous topics: some about work and some not exactly about work, after all this was really one of the few occasions where I really got to meet Susan in person (the last time had been in the Cutler gardens several weeks ago!) so it was awesome to get to interact with her all the way over on the long ride. We arrived at the site that we’d be doing our program at around 5pm in the afternoon and unloaded the van, and then Kat was kind enough to host us at her home for dinner that night, after that, Susan and I were both pretty tired from the events of the day, and turned in early.
And suddenly, it was the day. We got up early around 7:30AM, grabbed a quick breakfast and were on the program site by 8:00AM, this time with Kelly also around to help us out with setup. Around 8:45, the kids started rolling in, with a total of 5, ranging from 8-16 years old.
We started our day off with a brief statistical activity, tossing a large inflatable globe, sharing a fun fact about ourselves, and simply recording whether our right thumb landed on land or water. After about 100 tosses, we reached a distribution of 36% land and 64% water, (however I might add that we might have had a slight skewing in the data from some of our participants). It was also really great to see the youth really settling in and getting comfortable with each other right from the outset. After that, we transitioned into an exercise with GIS, more specifically, geocaching! Each youth was set up with a handheld GPS, and we set off to find the cache that was hidden on the grounds. I was pleasantly surprised to see how excited some of the younger youth were to be going on a ‘treasure hunt’ and seeing their eyes light up when they found the cache. Afterwards we headed back to our base camp to do some more interesting analysis with our GPS’s. In addition to tracking our positions, the GPS units also tracked our speeds (and our top speeds, yes there was a foot race involved) throughout the excursion, change in elevation, and total distance traveled, all on Google Earth. Once again, it was fun to see the youth getting excited about the data and talking to each other about their short foray into Geospatial technology. After this initial block (the first of four), it was time for a quick snack.
After snack was over, we began to dip our toes into the concept of fluorescence and its connection with GIS, we started by discussing how Satellites are used to observe the Earth from above, and how satellites were capable of measuring all manners of different types of light. We followed this brief lesson up by getting to really interact with some of the more uncommon forms of light, light via fluorescence! In this period of time, fluorescent beads that changed color under UV light were brought out, bracelets were made, and all manner of different objects were brought out to test and see if they exhibited any strange properties under the black light. You wouldn’t believe how astounded the kids were when they saw the beads changing color (you should’ve seen their faces, it was priceless). Following these fun activities, we had lunch.
In the afternoon, we did a small pivot to get onto the topic of plants, and we did this via foldscopes, a company which created microscopes with up to 140x magnification all for the price of 1$, its crazy what people come up these days! (I wish I had one of these when I was younger), after showing the kids how to mount the slides and view small objects, for example, pieces of hair, grains of rice, we then provided them with some glass slides of plant cells, and more specifically, chloroplasts, so that they’d be able to observe chlorophyll. This effectively allowed us to arrive at the topic of plants. Once we were there, it was all about trying to put the pieces together, satellite imaging and measurement, fluorescent properties, and plants. It just so turns out, that a very small amount of the energy in photosynthesis for plants is released as fluorescent light and is measurable by satellites! And it also happens to be a way for farmers and scientists to get a relatively effective general sense of large plant ecosystems and their overall health, and that is immensely important. Unfortunately, I’m afraid this large scale picture went over the heads of most of our participants and they weren’t sure what they were hearing (this is definitely a topic that will be discussed about next week when talking about curriculum development.) Following this discussion, we began the first steps towards large experiment of the day, which was the attempt to extract chlorophyll from plants and observe the fluorescent properties for ourselves. We started this out by using our UV flashlights in a dark room on some plants while wearing glasses filtering out blue light to see if plants really did glow as they had been told! And while I personally did not see it (I’m red-green colorblind) judging by the responses of the room, it seems that plants indeed do glow. We allowed the youth to hold onto this idea while we took a short break.
In the final section of the day, we began the extraction, using forks and spoons, we mashed up some spinach that had been prepared previously, and added some rubbing alcohol to see if we’d be able to extract the chlorophyll into the solvent, making (hopefully) fluorescent paint, we encouraged the youth to test and experiment, using their newly made paint on white and black papers, to varying results. To attempt to increase the success of the experiment, we did a simple liquid-liquid extraction using a non polar oil layer with the alcohol. As we waited for the layers to separate, we had the youth try their hand at a simple quiz, trying to differentiate between the seasons of 4 different maps based off of just the measured fluorescence at a given month. I was quite surprised to see the positive response that the youth had to this activity, they reasoned through quiz well, and were able to articulate their thought process in their selections, leading to overall success for the most part. We were approaching the end of the day, and throughout its entirety, Kelly had been taking photos and recording the days activities in a story map, for the final touches, we enlisted the help of our youth to select photos and provide captions.
And just like that, it was time for cleanup, Susan and I headed back to Ithaca, stopped at the famous Roscoe Diner, unpacked the fleet vehicle, and headed off to spend our evenings at home.
Overall I thought the day went relatively well, but there were certainly aspects that I did not touch on here that need to be further developed, as well as portions of the day that could have gone more smoothly, but this blog post has become rather lengthy, and so I will hold off on this discussion until next week. That said, I thought that this was a good first step towards developing this curriculum for future use for other 4-H and CCE Programs, and that there is a lot of potential, given that a few of the activities are fleshed out a little bit more and the scaffolding is more refined for certain age groups.
I’ll see you next week.
-Rob 🙂
P.S. Here’s the Story Map from our day up in Orange, please enjoy the photos and the journey through the day that we got to have with our youth!