I’ve been checking my inbox every five minutes this morning, because I am expecting to receive two of the coolest emails ever.  Let’s rewind a bit first.  Back in November I met with two groups of high school students from Forest Lawn High School and Bishop Carroll High School.  These students have joined the High School Science Café Program at TELUS Spark, where they came in for a training and leadership session for how to run their own Science Café back at their own high schools.  

If you have never been to a Science Café and you live in Calgary, you should check them out at the Ironwood Stage and Grill every last Thursday of the month (next one is Thursday, January 24^th with Jay Ingram and Dr. Valerie Sim discussing Science vs. the Media).  This provides an opportunity to hang out at a pub, enjoy a brew or some dinner, while listening to a panel discussion, followed by an open floor for questions and answers; and let me tell you – the Science Café goers sure know how to ask the BEST questions.

Obviously the youth science cafes can’t take place in pubs, but there are several ways to create an informal environment; science cafés are anything but boring, and nothing like a lecture (So each team is asked to find a non-classroom space in their school as a venue).  During the training session, students participated in their own science café hosted at TELUS Spark, titled “What Questions Do You Ask When Building A New Science Centre?” where they met Julie Bowen, VP of Content and Katherine Ziff, Exhibit Developer to discuss this question and feel out how a science café runs.  The teams explored the galleries and then together they brainstormed a list of questions they felt could make compelling science cafes.  The questions they came up with blew me away, and would all make outstanding Science Café topics:

- Can your eyes pop out if you sneeze with your eyes open?
- What caused the dancing plague of 1518?
- Why is chocolate so addicting?
- Why so breakups suck so much?
- Could you donate your brain?
- Will Star Trek ever be real?
- Overpopulation:  is there enough room for all of us?
- Why do we have toe hair?  (Edit: YES, REALLY, WHY DO HUMANS HAVE TOE HAIR!?)
- What is the speed of STD Transmission?
- Why is processed cheese processed?
- How does glue stick?
- If an airplane is on a treadmill, can it take off? 

So, I am waiting for the email that contains their final questions.  Although the students brainstormed together during the training session, they were encouraged to repeat this process at their schools, and to narrow down their ideas by crowdsourcing their student body to figure out which topics their peers would be most excited to hear about at their science café.   Today is their deadline to tell us their top 3 choices for science café topics.  From there, TELUS Spark has committed to matching these students with a panel of two speakers from either industry or academia who could best address at least one of their three questions to their student body (and we want to match them up with GREAT speakers: knowledgeable, engaging, and maybe even funny folks).  I’m really excited to hear what questions students will want to address – and more so, I’m excited for them to host events that they completely developed on their own. 

Yesterday, I received this note from the Forest Lawn group’s teacher liaison; here is an excerpt. 

“We are meeting tomorrow to go over the results of the student survey and should have some questions by tomorrow. My students were drawn to the topic of relationships so my guess is that our questions will relate to different aspects of love.”

Oh man.  These students are going to be creating something really special.   

If the High School Science Café program sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, please get in touch at and we can discuss how you can join this initiative (Claudia.Bustos@sparkscience.ca).  This a free outreach program, and were students commit to hosting one or two science cafés in their high schools, and TELUS Spark provides them with the training (and a free visit to TELUS Spark with funds from NSERC Canada), tools and funding to produce their own speaker series.  And if you are not in high school anymore, and over 18, please join us at the Ironwood Stage and Grill on January 24^th 2011.   

-Claudia

Comments »

My iPhone recently alerted me that I have filled it’s photo taking capacity to the brim, which means I had to upload a bunch of photos to my computer.  This is awesome, because I have tons of photos from the “recent past” to share.  Going through the photo stream brought to focus how much has happened in the past few months!  We’ve been all over the place getting ready for opening day.  I will review the phone highlights now, and go into depth with some of these events later this week. 

The team has kept busy on the weekends down at Market Collective.  For our April event we invited market goers to build a cardboard forest and for the May event we asked people about their favourite places in Calgary and within Alberta.

If you helped us with this project, you're awesome! Also click to see larger image.

If you click to enlarge this image, you can see that someone annotated one of their favourite places in Alberta to be the home of a cool cat. I support cool cat spotting!

Later in May we were exhibitors’ at Calgary’s International Children’s Festival!   You can read up on what we were up to here. 

In spite of the rain, Children's Fest is the best! Great theatre festival for all ages! My favourite show this year was Circus Incognitus. So wonderful and whimsical!

We continued with in-house fabrication of programming materials including electricity blocks, shadow puppet screens, and marble machines. 

Jeff and I sanding down blocks to be used for an electricity program. And Mr. Bill working hard on project construction. Any opportunity to work in the shop makes me the happiest person ever.

 A team of us has emptied out our programming supplies from all over the building and our external warehouse, all into one centralized area in the former WowTown.  These before and after shots should give you an idea of all the materials we currently have in house. 

WowTown is the former 'Iceberg Room' turning Titanic. It is huge. It is now filled with every programming material we've ever owned. We're working on getting it organized. It's like a more pleasant episode of Hoarders.

This is essentially the accumulation of 44 years of materials all in one room. We've tossed and recycled a lot of thngs we will never use, but we are still getting ready for our move. More on this later!

We found some weird things while cleaning up. Like several relic floppy disks and a sassy 'Grandma' calendar...

Offsite visits in July!  Katherine, myself and Lia Rogers from Dorkbot Calgary went to check out the Open Studio Day for the R.I.P. Workshop in Banff. 

We’ve had several meetings an entire Content Team to discuss and map out our deliverables and align our priorities for opening day.  All employee training has kicked off  as well.   We meet every Tuesday and Thursday so that upon completion, every member of staff from finance, house keeping, programs etc., will have the skills that they need to be a facilitator at the New Science Centre!  Training has been a blast!   

Photos of organizational meetings, which are essential at this point. And the middle right hand photo is from a training session where we re-created the colour of a memorable sky in our lives.

Also  – super exciting news –  last week the exhibits for Open Studio have arrived to two weeks ago to the New Science Centre Site!  Installation has commenced! 

These are not my iPhone photos. But I still felt the need to share them!

We’re going to get even busier now, so we try to squeeze fun in whenever we can!  Even if it’s jumping rope in the hallway.  

Dana jumping rope!

Stay tuned.  A lot of updates (both current and retrospective) to come! 

-Claudia

Comments »

#32 Listen Carefully:  Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine.  By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires or ambitions, we fold their world into our own.  Neither party will ever be the same.

When you take a step back and see the long view, it is easy to see why collaboration rules.  A lot was accomplished this week, but not without the help of many very helpful folks.  This week we were testing the Building for Sound Program for Grade 3, which integrates the ‘Building with Variety of Materials’ and ‘Hearing and Sound’ curriculum into one program. In this workshop students use an assortment of materials to create a sound proof chamber that must block the sound of an alarm, and then they must re-assess their materials to create a device that will make their alarm even louder than its original starting point.

Initially, I had some questions about using sound meters in programming which Devon¹ recommended I ask the ASTC listserv, and I got some very useful and resourceful answers from far-away folks (thanks Cricket², Anders³ and Kendall⁴!).  Cricket send me THIS NEWSWEEK article includes a brief description of how the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame School had their students develop their own designs to sound proof their school’s library: (1) amazing group project and (2) can you imagine going to school at the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum?  What an opportunity!

Next, I needed another sound meter.  My colleague  Alex⁵ had a digital meter kicking around his apartment, but I also wanted to compare this to an analog meter.  Alex had a contact at SAIT⁶, who then forwarded me to Laurie Johnson⁷ from the Film and Video Production Department.  I met with him on Monday next to flag poles by an interesting statue (his choice of meeting place), and he showed me the meter and then gave me a brief sound lesson via diagram – which rocked because I love diagrams.  Our collaboration was meant to happen.

Laurie's analog sound meter VS Alex's digital sound meter.

Laurie taught me that you don't have to point the sound meter towards the sound source because it has an omni-directional microphone.

An example of waveforms that cancel each other out i.e. sound cancellation...

What Laurie envisioned the students building, and how the sound would travel from their sound maker beyond their sound proof chamber.

Laurie's diagram for where he suggested students should obtain readings for their structures (we are just getting one reading instead but look at the person having a great time testing out their sound proofing!)

Laurie's diagram for how sound can attenuate (decrease in intensity) at a rate of 1 to the square root of 1 (technical and awesome diagram)

The squiggle towards the left corner shows us how sound can really be affected by reflecting off of corners in rooms.

The original diagram sheet where our entire discusion at SAIT lived. So awesome! Thanks Laurie you rule!

Collaboration continued in full swing when I heard back from our teacher contact at Langevin School⁸ (the New Science Centre’s next door neighbor) and we were given the go ahead to test with the students on Wednesday morning.   I ran the preliminary program with 3 sets of 20 grade 3-4 students⁷⁰, which was a nice way to assess what materials worked, what sizes  and quantities were best, whether students needed sound meters (yes), whether they could read the digital and the analog meters (yes, yes), and what types of challenges they could solve.  Three hours of testing and we’re at ahead count of 70 collaborators.

Then the next day we were testing at Elbow Valley School, which our VP of Digital IT⁷¹ helped us connect with (thanks Robert!)  Carly⁷² and Stacey⁷³ were also testing offsite this day, but we were short on vehicles so they drove me all the way out to Spring Bank before they headed off to their program.  Alan⁷⁴ came to test with me, which was incredible, because he helped facilitated these sessions and brought me lunch since there is nowhere near this school to get a snack!  He brainstormed some really great new building challenges for the students which we were able to test yesterday; this solidified our program, and added some parameters which made it simultaneously more fun, engaging and challenging for the students.  Amazing!

At Elbow Valley School we had 5 classes of roughly 20 students, their teachers and their principal for a total of 106 more collaborators for this program¹⁸⁰.  We wouldn’t normally do this in a program that is operational, but when testing we asked the first two groups how they could change this program for it to be even better.  The students said they wanted harder challenges, and some of the ones they thought of are as follows; Challenge 1:  Everyone has to create a device that can get their sound maker to balance at 75 dB.  Challenge 2:  Everyone can only pick ten pieces of two types of materials.

Overall I would say collaboration for the win (#collaborationFTW).  This is a new process for me, where in the past I’ve worked alone, and really, that is a pretty scary retrospective thought after seeing how much growth this program has had with each additional collaborator.

What a great way to end the week!   I still owe you guys a post about how the ‘Air Lab’ program is progressing, and I will write that up over the weekend/later!

-Claudia

p.s. If I forgot anyone in this post, I am totally sorry, and that would make it 180+ collaborators!  Great!

Comments »

If you haven’t read Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, and you work in any creative or idea driven field, I highly suggest you read it NOW.  The Manifesto really helps steer me in a constructive direction when I need to refocus.  I’ve been trying to get several projects organized right now, and the blog seemed like a really great place to organize some of my thoughts.    With that in mind, today let’s focus on Manifesto Point #9:

“BEGIN ANYWHERE – John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis.  His advice:  begin anywhere”.

This notion is such a relief, and when starting a project, knowing that you can begin anywhere, and truck along towards progress is really the way to go.  This is the thinking behind how we developed our new grade 6 air program.  At the initial concept development stage for this program, I was super stuck.  These poorly drawn diagrams illustrate what direction this program was going in, but it didn’t feel right for several reasons.  So I discussed with various team members. 

Figure 1. Initial brainstorming...

Figure 2. More brainstorming and poorly drawn diagrams.

Everything brainstormed sounded like a) something a teacher could do in their classroom just as well as we could b) something that could lead to ‘fake science’ notions c) just tired and less relevant than the ideal final outcome.  My lab mate Katherine noticed my mental block and after chatting it out we discovered that a) I was stuck on learning outcomes instead of ‘cool things we can do with air’ and b) we needed to have a mini rig with the rest of the team. 
The functional definition of a rig may be floating around somewhere else on this blog, but just as a refresher:  RIG – Rapid Idea Generation.  For our purposes, we just got everyone in the lab, and they had one task that they had to do: prove to me that air exists.  They could use any of the bins in the lab, any material that was necessary to prove to me that air exists.  I told them I didn’t believe air existed because I can’t see it.  They found SEVERAL VERY AMAZING ways to prove to me that air exists. 

Figure 3. Alan said he could prove to me that air exists if I got into this plastic bag. I ignored common sense and jumped in...

Figure 4. Stacey helped arrange the plastic bag, while Alan got the vaccuum ready.

Figure 5. Alan gets his experiment on the go. All you need is one volunteer (me), a vacuum, and a plastic bag and you can really feel the change in air pressure as you are vaccuum sealed into a plastic bag.

Figure 6. This experiment was not as affective with two people in the plastic bag...but we were trying to see how many people could potentially be included in this experience.

Figure 8. Pat did not expect the sudden change in air pressure/intense quishing sensation. Thanks for trying it out Pat!

Figure 9. Look carefully at this photo! Alex made himself an 'air detector'. It was so great! Essentially a glorified headband with a propeller (red thing over his head) so you can SEE when air is interacting with it! Look at him go!

Figure 10. Stacey, Alan, myself and half of Alex's head watching the other developer's present their proof that air exists.

Figure 11. This photo does not need a caption.

From here we were able to hone in on some things that felt right, and were more in line with the direction I wanted to take the air program.  I really liked the idea of ‘air detectors’ as a concept.  Although the air detector hat Alex created was not the most tangible idea, I loved the idea of having students prove to the facilitator that air exists by doing their own experiments; having them use what they already know about air to prove its existence.  This created a concept to move this program forward, and the rest of the developers helped me select bins of materials I could use when testing.  They selected tons of great materials including aluminum foil, tissue paper, packaging peanuts, cellophane, coloured gels, Mylar, tinsel, Tygon tubing, other tubing, turkey basters, propellers, plastic straws, plastic bags, bubble wrap, Nalgene containers, balloon pumps, air pumps, other pumpy devices, gliders, turbines, dryer tubing.  It was awesome to realize that that as a group of developers, we moved this program from a good future program, to what may be a great future program. 

Figure 12. A much more exciting batch of programming ideas. Thanks everybody!

I know the above Post-It Notes scan is pretty blurry, which is intentional, to leave you in suspsense!  I’ll follow up on how this program pilot went shortly; in the meantime I will leave you with Manifesto Point#3

 “Process is more important than outcome – when the outcome drives the process we will only ever go where we’ve already been.  If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.”

-Claudia

Comments »