ScienceWorld Science Fair Banquet, May 21, 2005

The event was a farewell banquet put on by SFU student services as a soft recruitment event. Four demonstrations were thrown together, with the emphasis being on sophisticated physics related to current research at SFU. The audience was of 500 national science fair contestants, aged 13-18, and their 200 supervisors. Four was a good number of demos; more would have been hard to transport and set-up, and fewer would have been anti-climactic. For next time, posters should be made for all the demos, dedicating the last panel to current research at SFU in the related field. The kids were interested in what it was physicists actually did. Also, make up and bring a general SFU Physics sign. More durable and convenient travel boxes would be great if these sort of off-site events become more common. The demos we brought were a thermo-acoustic generator, an instructional scanning-tunneling microscope, an integrated circuit display, and some electromagnetism demos. The entire display would have been boring if the kids hadn't been able to interact with people who knew the physics behind each demo well. The hands-on aspect of each individual display lay in their ability to ask questions and think about what they were seeing.

Thermo-Acoustic Generator

The generator consists of some copper tube wrapped around a stainless tube. One end of the stainless tube is heated and cool water flows through the copper tube, causing air to oscillate through a heat exchanger inside the stainless tube. The device is tuned so that the oscillating air resonates with the length of the tube and produces a loud sound. The sound was a little annoying after four hours; it might be nice to put this demo a little further away from the others. A poster would improve this demo considerably, showing how the device can be used as a refrigerator. The response was good, especially as the process of pouring water and lighting a torch is exciting to watch. The ability to change pitch by extending the length of the rod was nice. Geoff Archibald (gda@sfu.ca) is the keeper of the generator.

Scanning Tunneling Microscope

The instructional STM is large, vibrationally sensitive, and quite sophisticated. The physics is impressive, and allows the opportunity of getting kids thinking about quantum mechanics, but much of the demo may have gone over their heads because they lacked the background. The device is hard to transport, and while it will scan there are far too many vibrations at any outreach event to get a nice image. The demo was helped by some pictures and would benefit from a full poster. Overall, I would not bring this to a similar event again. Laura Schmidt (lmschmid@sfu.ca) keeps the STM, and Karen Kavanagh (kavanagh@sfu.ca) manned it at the event.

Integrated Circuits

Three silicon wafers of various sizes were mounted in frames and displayed. There was also a microscope with a flexcam attached and a monitor to display the image. A cut open old transistor and some memory chips were mounted on slides and placed under the microscope. 100x magnification was sufficient to see the transistor chip. The memory chips were not as impressive looking. A poster was made which held the display together and made it into an interesting look at microprocessors. Pat Mooney (pmooney@sfu.ca) has the display.

Electromagnetism

The electromagnetism display consisted of many smaller demonstrations. Most evident and impressive was the superconducting train, which hovers around a track after being cooled by liquid nitrogen. The track and train are kept by Pat Turner (pturner@sfu.ca). The Meisner effect demo, which consists of a small magnet which floats above a cooled superconductor was a natural add-on to the train. The eddy current demo was next to that, consisting of three bars of different materials,  copper, brass and plexiglass. A case for this demo which provides a nice ramp would be good, as would a sheet of this plexiglass or acetate to place over the bars, proving the different speed are not a product of friction. This demo doesn't capture people immediately, but was well received once people got interested, and worked nicely with the superconductivity demos. A flashlight with a coil of wire in series with the bulb was the last electricity demo. The flashlight noticeably brightens after the copper wire is immersed in liquid nitrogen. This demo was rarely used, as people usually moved on after watching the train for a little while. Both Chris Bidinosti (cpbidino@sfu.ca) and Barbara Frisken (frisken@sfu.ca) worked at this station, as one volunteer was not enough for the number of demos. In four hours, we went through less than 5L of liquid nitrogen. Again, a poster or two would improve the display. The keeper of all the electromagnetism demos except the train is Jeff Rudd (rudd@sfu.ca).