Rain, rain go away…. It didn’t work. Even though it rained for the entire time I was at the festival, except for a couple of hours, the festival seemed to be well attended.

The F15 cockpit is part of a simulator used to train our pilots.

Mobile learning adventure for kids 5 and under, part of early childhood development. Children had their choice of astronaut, scrubs, ballerina, police officer, pilot, doctor, etc.

Sidebar: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math)

Experiment: chemical reaction, baking soda and vinegar going through a nozzle. The participants pick the size of the nozzle to see how high they can shoot the carbon dioxide and water.

Additional experiments:

Sidebar: If I didn’t have all my camera gear and it wasn’t raining, I would have waited my turn to get on the bike!

How do you turn a banana into a piano?

We use a makeymakey.com, which is a pretty simple circuit board. Bananas are good conductors. They have water and a soft peel so they can feel the jolt of energy. We have it programmed as a piano circuit. If we have one hand on the foil, which is also a good conductor that’s our grounding wire, and if we tap on a piece of fruit, like a banana, it closes the circuit. That is what allows it to make the piano notes that we keyed it to. We use scratch for our piano coding, which is a free coding website that MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) put out (scrate.mit.edu). People can go to the website and create simple code like the piano keyboard.

What happens if I don’t hit the foil, do I get a jolt?

No possibility of getting a jolt. It is closed circuit and we are under the tent. It is very safe. No crazy electricity kicking back.

What happens if you go out in the rain, then touch the banana?

We have had people here all day and nobody had a static shock.

Sidebar: This was VERY interesting. I was going through the list of young people I know who might appreciate doing this activity. Where was this activity during the junior high and high school science fair projects?

My take on theCOSI Science Festival: This took be back down memory lane to the school visits at COSI and Mr. Lewis’ science classes at the Battelle Math Science program! This festival isn’t just for kids, it is for the young at heart!