The best part of a tour is that as soon as you’re finished one amazing day, you start another. Dr Ben’s last blog post was typed up last night in Alum Creek State Park just north of Columbus, Ohio. We had spent the late afternoon touring Farber Specialty Vehicles‘ factory floor and talking shop with the Farber family, then did a little grocery shopping at The Hills Market before heading up to the state park. More on Farber next week, as we will be making a return visit to their shop on our way back East.
Alum Creek, located just north of Columbus, was a really nice change from the truck stops and Walmart parking lots we’d been staying in. The beauty of the BioBus is our ability to just “roll up” to a place and be ready to go- in addition to our state-of-the-art microscope lab and internet-ready computer lab, we have a fully functional kitchen on board. We were able to cook a really nice meal and relax under the stars. Of course, we got some water samples from Williams Lake while we were there, which we used today during our classes at Olentangy Liberty Middle School.
Today was an amazing day! We taught our physics module, which focuses on the microscopic meaning of temperature & its implications on unicellular life. The kids at Olentangy were really enthusiastic, and so were their teachers. Mr. Griffiths, an 8th grade science teacher, taught (with demonstration!) the “Molecule Dance” to all his kids. I have to give credit here to my 8th grade science teacher, Mr. Kramlik, who as far as I know invented the molecule dance. It’s a physical demonstration of Brownian motion and how it relates to phase changes in water. While Mr. Griffiths was outside doing the dance, Dr. Ben was in the lab demonstrating the visual effects of Brownian motion with microscopic polystyrene beads. Small enough to be affected by molecular movements, these beads are a great way to view the motion caused by thermal energy. The third section of each class was in the Computer Lab with me, where we talked about the implications of Brownian motion on unicellular life: bacteria, roughly the same size as our polystyrene beads, are so small that they have to expend considerable energy just to counter the forces of Brownian motion.
We closed the day with a return trip to The Hills Market, where we gave back to them the cutting board and knife which they SO generously offered to let us borrow for our camping trip. On the way there, I baked some fresh cookies with the pre-made cookie dough they sell in their store ($6.99 for two pounds!) to present to them. On the whole, it was a friendship well formed.
Ben and I are just about to turn in here at the home of Linda Duke, one of our fine hosts from the Indianapolis Art Museum; she graciously offered us her house for the night we are here. Tomorrow we’ll be at Cold Spring Middle School, where we’ll be teaching our physics, cell biology, and ecology modules to 6th through 8th graders. It should be a great day, as we have a whole team of science teachers from Marian University joining us for the day.
Cheers,
Ric
