SciGirls II Day 2 2016

We started our magical morning with a visit from MK Haley, Disney Imagineer and FSU professor. She discussed with us how, in her line of work she has to consider engineering and numerous areas of science. She introduced her cooperative activity discussing that the fastest, most powerful techniques for improving a team's capacity to generate fresh ideas, build rapport and incorporate prototyping. All of these are at the heart of effective innovation. Then the girls were given "The Marshmallow Challenge," by using one yard of tape, one yard of string, 20 pieces of spaghetti, a marshmallow and 18 minutes to complete the tallest structure while supporting the marshmallow. After the 18 minutes were up, 3 teams were successful having a structure of 24 inches to support the marshmallow while the other teams were still challenged! The "safety guy" joined us next to talk to us about safety that could be of concern and to mitigate with our next activity with Cummings Scientific. Samantha Evans, a simulations engineer and Beau Biller, an engineering manager, came to the MagLab to show how Cummings Scientific uses skid marks and other data to explain car accidents and how/why they happened. They used a Volvo to reach a certain speed. Our girls were to pay close attention to where the car began to break and where the car actually came to a stop. The activity was videotaped as the girls observed. Girls learned about friction and anti lock brakes. After the experiment, the girls measured the breaking distance as 15 feet and 4 inches using a trundle wheel while 10 feet was the constant speed measurement. The girls discussed the difference between speed and velocity, analized the video finding the number of frames and the distance of 10 frames with 30 frames per second. We all determined it took 1/3 of a second to go the 10 feet. Doing some math we got that the car was traveling at 30 feet per second then had to convert that into miles per hour finding it was 20.4 mph. We talked about ratios and friction while reviewing Newton's Laws and the Law of Conservation of Energy. Though it was a lot of math, our girls learned a lot about the math and science that all goes into these types of investigations. The end of our day was spent making chaos! Chaos Towers, that is! The girls' task was to work as a team to create a track for a marble in which the marble has "fun." With this, they also considered giving the marble a long travel time, and a goal of bouncing from the trampoline into a bucket. Our groups were mostly successful and had a great time creating chaos! Tomorrow, we look forward to rock climbing, playing with therapy animals, and learning all about Astronomy!