4-H + Science = Fun

 Today we took a travel break and stayed in the office to work on some chemistry, air displacement, circuits, and we threw in some Virtual Reality learning to round it all off.  Curious are you?  Well feel free to read on.

   We started the day working on Cake Chemistry.  This is an NC A&T curriculum that allows youth to explore the properties of ingredients used in making cakes, how they interact and what it would take to make the perfect cake recipe.  We gave our youth the initial ingredients of flour, milk, oil, sugar, vanilla, and let them choose between baking soda and powder.  They had to make their own batter using the ingredients and write down their recipes.  

  While everything baked we learned the difference between baking soda and baking powder.  Baking soda can last indefinitely and is used in baking when there is an acid such as lemon or lime juice, or vinegar to activate it.  The chemical activation allows for a fluffy and higher leavening of the cake.  Baking powder is baking soda with an acid added in.  It often takes more baking powder than baking soda for the same reaction.  Baking powder is activated when mixed with a liquid and again when it is heated (as in when the batter goes into the oven).  We collected gases from baking powder and baking soda and after collecting all the data our scientists decided to go ahead with baking powder for their cake revision.

  When the cakes came out of the oven they dissected them and tasted them.  There were obvious issues that they noted.  One team had a fluffy but dense cake the other team had a flat, dense cake that they said tasted good, in small bites.  After reassessing their ratio of wet to dry ingredients, and adding in the baking powder they tried again.  This time the cakes were more cake like, the flavor was decent, but they said they would need to tweak it more to find the perfect cake recipe.

After lunch we worked on air displacement by working with balloons.  We used balloons we could make into shapes and learned about the elasticity of latex and how to move the air within the balloon to create a dog.  We also learned that if you blow the balloon up too much it will pop rather than twist into shapes.  We weren't as slow as snails doing it, but I think it is fair to say we enjoyed the time it took us to make the different creatures.

Our campers also had a chance to get on the VR goggles and go into outer space.  They floated above the earth and also explored other opportunities available in the glasses.  Pretty sure their favorite was exploring the engineering of roller coasters and what can happen when you have forward momentum without tracks in place.  

Then we also explored circuits with our remote car and variety board.  Then we talked about plasma and static electricity with our balloons and plasma conductor.  We had a lot of fun today.

To check out our fun in photos please click on this link.  Stay tuned as we hit the road again tomorrow to explore the wild blue yonder.