Instead of our usual trend of visiting the students at their schools, we invited the students to visit the UMN campus for an end-of-the-year field trip! We had three exciting days of science demonstrations and lab tours for our partner schools, Andersen United Middle School, Heritage Academy, and Murray Middle School. From May 17 - 19, our co-Presidents, Rohan Chakraborty and Maya Ramamurthy, organized almost 30 volunteers and over 100 students for our field trip series.
Our first experiment, led by Brian Bayer, Elijah Kipp, Kaylie Richard, and Mayank Tanwar, focused on diffusion and convection. To start the day off, students studied the diffusion of Skittles in cold water, hot water, and milk. With many different candy colors to choose from, the students experimented with different orientations and groupings of the candy to create their own colorful patterns in each liquid. They found that putting Skittles in hot water led to the fastest diffusion of color while putting the Skittles in milk led to almost no diffusion.
Then, the students learned how convection is different from diffusion. Each group of students were given beakers of hot and cold water as well as two sets of filters with different membrane sizes. They were tasked with figuring out which filter had the larger membrane size by determining which fluid would disperse drops of food coloring faster. They found that the beakers of hot water distributed the food coloring throughout the beaker much faster than that for cold water.
Once they completed their first experiment, the students were able to either tour different research labs or explore the 3D printing space in the Valspar Lab. Brian Bayer and Eli Kipp in Professor Aditya Bhan's research group and Daniel Krajovic in Professor Marc Hillmyer's research group gave tours of their lab spaces to show the many instruments they regularly work with. The students asked questions about what these instruments do and what a day in the life of a graduate student looks like.
For our second experiment, Janani Narayan led an activity on potato burps! The students learned about enzymes and their important functions in many biological applications. They got to watch an enzyme work in real time by seeing how the catalase enzyme breaks down hydrogen peroxide to produce water and oxygen gas. After blending potatoes, the students soaked filters with their enzyme (the potato slurry) and placed the filters in beakers of hydrogen peroxide to watch and time the filters as they slowly rose due to the oxygen gas being released. Different teams of students made different concentrations of the enzyme by mixing water and the potato slurry in different ratios. The students all came together at the end to compare their results and found that with the more enzyme present, the faster their filters rose.
Lastly, we finished our field trip with lunch and dessert! During lunch, the students got to chat with graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and faculty members. Professors Ben Hackel and Kim Kosto volunteered to chat with the students about going to college. In these conversations, they learned about the different career options in STEM and the backgrounds of our diverse range of volunteers. After lunch, the students went outside to enjoy the sun and eat some liquid nitrogen ice cream! Grant Larson and Kristine Loh led the liquid nitrogen activities, which included demonstrations of the effects of very cold temperatures on different materials. Students got to play with balloons, rubber bands, marshmallows, and cheese puffs dipped in liquid nitrogen.
Overall, we sincerely enjoyed having the students on campus for a field trip and were thankful that all of the students and teachers had a lot of fun!
