Triad Today - Uncg science everywhere festival

[Music] Hello everyone, I’m Jim Longworth and welcome to another edition of Triad Today. Coming up later on, our infamous round table convenes. We will talk about a lot of controversial issues including that House Bill 2, the one that deals with transgenders' use of public facilities. We will get into that and much more. Between now and then some great guests and important information coming your way. Winston-Salem mayor Allen Joines will be here to tell us about his poverty initiative. I have a special guest from Alamance Community College to tell us how they are helping to accommodate university students during summer school. It’s a neat program. We will have two distinguished doctors from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center to tell us about their new center for obesity, diabetes, and metabolism. But first, it’s time for science. That’s right, this is science class. Science is everywhere, thanks to UNCG. Lori Bates, our director, meet our two very special guests from the great university down the street. Lynn Sametz, a facilitator of the RISE network, College of Arts and Sciences at UNCG. Next to her is Matt Fisher, assistant director of the SELF Design Center at the School of Education. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Fellow Spartans. Now, what is Science Everywhere? Lynn, I’m going to get you to do the readers digest version of that first one Sametz: So, Science Everywhere is a hands-on science event all over campus. We have more than 70 activities; everything is free, open to the public. It’s just a great way to celebrate science. Longworth: So it’s not going to be like under one tent or one row, it’s going to be everywhere. Sametz: We are spread out all over campus this year from Foust Park, to Sullivan, Coleman, as well as the School of Education. Longworth: We’re going to give a couple plugs to this. Just a production note, Lori and Brian, up on screen now. Saturday April 16, noon to four p.m. We're just going to say at UNCG because it’s everywhere, and I’ll put that up on screen again in a minute along with a website that you just put online. Now, this is not just students, you want families to come out. Sametz: Oh we want families to come. Last year we had children as young as three through grandparents. It really is for anyone who wants to just have a really fun day on campus. Longworth: Why did you look at me when you said grandparents? Sametz, laughing: I could look at myself and say grandparents! Longworth: Now what kind of activities Lynn, are going to be featured at this event? Give me an example of a couple things we might see when we come. Sametz: So you can make your own DNA necklace and take it home, you can pet a reptile or an amphibian, which you might not do everyday. Right. The nano bus, which is out of the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering will be on campus and you can learn that, you know, Cheerios actually contain iron. Longworth: Really? That’s a lot of neat stuff. Matt, let me turn to you for a second. How is the School of Education involved in this? Fisher: What’s special about the School of Education is all of the activities, there will be about 30 activities in the School of Education. They're all run by our School of Education pre-service teachers. So they have designed the activities, and they will run them for the public. A lot of them are inquiry activities. It's not you just come in, and you create something by procedure. It's that you are actually discovering it at as you are doing it. Longworth: Now I want Matt to show us real quickly what this experiment is. Now I know he is at a disadvantage because at the last minute I said do you have something small we can put up, because we don’t have a large desk here, so tell me very quickly what this is. Fisher: So this actually is a conductivity tester, and it uses a product called Little Bits, and what it does is it turns any conductible object into a button by completing a circuit. Longworth: Any conductible object? So you have a, it looks like a spring or a… Fisher: A slinky, an orange, I’ve got some keys, and a knife. But at the activity we might have a bunch of things that aren’t conductible as well. Longworth: Okay and once you connect all of this, it’s supposed to do what? Fisher: So what you do is if you touch this, this is my ground wire, and then if I touch something that’s conductible. Right? It causes that to happen. Or if I touch this, this is conductible. That’s going to make that happen. Longworth: Makes that spin. Lets get a shot of Matt and the... Lori. Now make that spin again, I want to see these two things spin. Can you make the top one spin? Okay that’s cool. So it’s a conductivity experiment. Fisher: This is actually an inventor’s kit, with this product, you can actually invent anything. We’ve had our students make anything from joke boxes to alarm systems to um. We have had a bunch of students, some deaf and hard of hearing students that designed homes for- model homes that... Longworth: - Now, when you say students you mean UNCG students, right? Fisher: We’re talking about UNCG students that worked with K-12 students in the district as well. Longworth: Isn’t that great? So, that goes back, Lynn, to what you were talking about, the families come in there, the kids will be exposed to these things, and maybe encourage them to create their own little experiments too. Sametz: That's what we hope. Longworth: Isn’t that great. I want to go back to this full screen thing. We want to talk about Science Everywhere, and it’s up there for April 16, 2-4 p.m. There’s also a new website that I think is up and working now that’s on screen, so we hope you will check that out. It also has I think some videos and whatever. You’ve been seeing some, I think there was a little footage we showed a couple minutes ago of kids having fun at these events, and you will see more of that on the website. Now this is just a great event, thank you for all you’re doing. Sametz: Our pleasure. Thanks. Come out and join us. Longworth: I’ll be looking forward to it, yeah, alright. We will be right back after this. [Music]