Flames! Explosions! Lamb hearts! All for the sake of
learning
”
This doesn’t look like a heart,
”
said Katelyn Brewer to her neighbor Christina Gorman while at
the same time drawing the familiar candy-heart shape with the tip
of her scalpel in the air.
”
You know, how people draw hearts.
”
As Brewer, a fifth grader at El Toro Elementary in Morgan Hill,
and her neighbors began slicing into their lambs’ hearts the truth
about the vital organ became apparent and interesting.
Flames! Explosions! Lamb hearts! All for the sake of learning
“This doesn’t look like a heart,” said Katelyn Brewer to her neighbor Christina Gorman while at the same time drawing the familiar candy-heart shape with the tip of her scalpel in the air. “You know, how people draw hearts.”
As Brewer, a fifth grader at El Toro Elementary in Morgan Hill, and her neighbors began slicing into their lambs’ hearts the truth about the vital organ became apparent and interesting.
“Come look at mine! Look in there, that is so cool,” said Martin Murphy Middle School eighth-grader Ryan Brewer, Katelyn’s decidedly less squeamish older brother, to Nicole Gorman.
“It looks like a slab of meat,” announces Katelyn, poking and prodding the innards.
“Oh Yeah! Look at that!” counters Ryan, obviously exagerating his excitement to show up his sister. “Whoa, hoa, hoa! That is so cool!”
Meanwhile, stuck in between the two posturing siblings, Britton Middle School eight grader Nicole Gorman silently probes the heart chambers with her fingers, a feat neither of the Brewers had worked up the gumption to do.
“You are are really enjoying it,” said Ryan Brewer after noticing Gorman’s quiet exploration of dense connected and elastic tissues.
“Sorry. I’m sooo grossed out,” she announced, though she couldn’t help but continue poking the lamb’s heart with the end of her probe, holding it as if it was part of the offending heart.
At Gavilan College on Saturday a few dozen kids learned the truth about hearts as modern science can tell us, just in time for more realistic Valentines cards.
The laws of organic life, physics and chemistry came alive during the annual Science Alive event. More than 250 junior high-age students from San Benito and Santa Clara County attended the six-hour event learning about 18 different topics in college classrooms on the Gavilan Campus.
This year five new workshops were added including The Secrets of Strawberries, where students extract the DNA of strawberries under the leadership of current Gavilan students. The simple process involved students crushing the strawberries with a dish-soap and salt-water solution that breaks down the cell wall and nucleus and causes the DNA to lose its structure. The students then used Ethanol to seperate the broken down DNA from the rest of the strawberry, causing it to float to the surface of the test tube. The gelatinous DNA received a lot of snickers when transferred to a plastic take-home cases. The DNA resembled the result of a runny nose more than a scientific wonder.
One of the most popular classes was the Build a Racer, where students made a racecar using a mousetrap as an engine and CDs as wheels. The desire for a bigger and faster racer exhibited itself in Kellin Rhodes of South Valley Middle School in Gilroy while he finished engineering his racer.
“Imagine if we made this with one of those huge mousetraps for rats,” he wondered aloud to his neighbors.
And if lamb hearts weren’t gross enough Dennis Harrigan of Gilroy’s Veterinary Hospital helped three groups of students learn about how we see by dissecting cow’s eyes.
“It’s an excellent way for kids to come and do some hands on projects,” said Harrigan who has been volunteering for Science Alive for at least ten years. “If we get one or two kids excited about science then we’ve done our job.”
And if none of the three workshops in the morning got the job done, the keynote speaker from Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley was sure to get the kids attention with his presentation: Flames, Flares and Explosions.
David Giordano, known to his presentees as Gio, taught the entire group of students about the three necessary components of fire: fuel, heat and oxygen. During his presentation he wowed the pre-adolescent audience with ever increasing bursts of flames and sparks, burning magnesium, steel wool, rubbing alcohol and and powdered lycopodium, a sort of dried moss.
