The Cavendish Laboratory is located in the West Cambridge Site – the newer (modern!) buildings are located in this area. It is quite a distance from the City Centre, so we drove there on our car and parked at a road nearby. It wasn’t as crowded as in the previous venue, there were plenty of spaces to move around, and had arguably more interesting setups and experiments.
Here are snapshots on our second time at the Cambridge Science Festival:
March 21, 2009
West Cambridge Site
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| First stop for the day: the planetarium. Definitely fascinating stuff for kids. 🙂 |
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| Inside the planetarium. People had to go through a zipped-on door and sit on the chairs around the dome…or squat on the floor. |
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| Next stop: make your own rockets! A facilitator explains to Aya how to make one using plastic tube and paper. |
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| A rocket is no fun at all if it doesn’t fly. Fortunately, the organizers knew that and they provided a way for those kiddie rockets to zoom into er, space. Here’s a guy powering up our rocket using a pump. That orange one is Aya’s. Aya got to arm and release the rocket on a controller. |
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| After watching our rocket fly into space and then nose-dive into the ground (fortunately we didn’t get our eyes poked), we moved on to more serious Physics stuff. 😉 Here Aya tries her hand on making a dragster – an elastically powered car. |
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| At our table…not quite finished yet. |
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| At first, Aya’s dragster went on a skewed direction, so someone helped her fix it. |
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| It runs, yay! The goal of this activity is to see how far the dragsters go, measure the time it takes and then compute the average speed. Aya’s dragster ran for about 2 m in less than 1 s. 🙂 |
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| Explaining to kids how Bernoulli’s Principle helps those airplanes fly. |
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| A simple experiment to test Bernoulli’s Principle. Levitate that pingpong ball while blowing very hard through a straw! After failing several times, Aya was finally able to do it much to the delight of spectators. |
I wish I could say, see you next year, but I don’t think we’d get the chance anymore. Still, it was all very interesting and hopefully, very educational for my little one. It sure made for a very memorable time here in Cambridge.
For those who missed some of the events, you may find some video/audio here.
hmmmmm… looks like Aya is going to be a science person like mom one day 🙂
belated happy bday Kathy! naku, you should bring aya to the science fairs here in tsukuba. it’s fun too. let her ask the facilitator in english with her british twang (hehehe). im sure maaliw ka on how the japanese facilitators would respond 😉
your little girl is very cute and she looks smart, too. what a fun and interesting festival. she must have enjoyed it very much. 😀
Hi Kathy, nice photos! Looks like Aya has adjusted well to life in the UK. Long time no visit ako…just got back to blogging today. 🙂 Hope you are all well.