Middle School

The City's Ocean Monitoring Program booth will have preserved marine invertebrates and fish on display. As well there will be a "fishing game" for children to teach them what is and is not sustainable sea food. We will be running a video loop of our ROV operations and our Benthic Sampling processing at sea. We will have a cable hanging with water sampling bottles attached to demonstrate how samples are collected for h2o quality analysis.

Our booth will be two tents. One is a workshop and the other is a "Walk-in-Painting" (based on a scientific topic) where public art created in our workshop tent, will be added to our interactive installation. This booth will be designed, built and ran by the students of Julian Charter School, San Diego Academy.

Microbes are all around us! Microscopic living organisms thrive in the depths of the ocean, to the most familiar of places like our food. The less than 1% that cause disease give microbes a bad reputation, but a majority have no or even a positive effect on humans. Stop by for an all-ages interactive experience on the microbes in our life! Brought to you by UCSD scientists currently studying the diverse way microbes can interact (on cheese!), engineering microbes to produce fuel, and more.

The UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research and the Center for Healthy Eating and Activity Research (CHEAR) are teaming up to recruit for various research studies on healthy eating and skill-based learning. Our research integrates brain imaging modalities to understand brain structure and function in eating disorders. CHEAR develops and provides treatments for promoting healthy eating and weight management to children, adolescents, adults through science and innovation.

A variety of NASA's planetary and Earth science missions, including Mars Science Lander, Jupiter orbiter Juno, and asteroid orbiter Dawn, will bring displays, exhibits, and hands-on activities to engage students and adults.

The Center for Selective C-H Functionalization will have a booth for the Expo Day with simple demos to educate K-12 students and beyond about synthetic organic chemistry. We will have Center graduate students volunteering for 2 hr shifts to engage with the participants. The demos are designed to be 2-3 minutes.

We will have several hands on demonstrations to provide participants with a view of the scale of the universe as well as the methods we use to observe it. Activities will include play-dough planets to build scale models of the solar system, an activity illustrating gravitational lensing, and some models and experimental devices from the lab to show the ins and outs of modern telescopes. We will also have an informational poster describing the ongoing research activities at CASS.

Cardboard Video Game Controllers! Students will make their own video game controllers that interface with a computer to play a preloaded video game(e.g. Super Mario). In Station 1, kids will color, cut, & decorate their controller design using markers, cardboard, and foil paper. In Station 2, they will connect their custom controllers to our laptops using our Makey Makey computer interface boards. Kids learn about circuits (closed v. open) & computer engr. design cycles (prototype & test).

Biology in 3D: The Protein Data Bank is the single worldwide resource for the 3D structures of proteins and DNA. You will learn about two basic building blocks of life: DNA and Proteins and then build a model of each. You will also see computer animations of 3D protein and DNA structures and learn how medicines work.

This year we will be trying to explain acceleration and velocity through Marble Roller Coasters where children will get the opportunity to construct their very own roller coaster using a marble and a other materials. Different materials will be presented to the children such as paper, PVC piping, tape, and etc.; the objective will be to use these materials to construct a track for the marble to roll on and to keep the marble rolling for as long as possible!