And have a happy new year!

Bye for 2014, McAuliffe!

Our first semester of Web Design and Scratch are over!

Check out the kids' websites! (And a reminder to Scratch kids, send me your programs if you want to show them off!)

Also, check out this guy using two robotic limbs at once! Technology is amazing.

Expanding hagfish slime

Science 3-5, as promised, here are the videos about hagfish and their amazing slime.





Also, remember the makeup class is next Monday and if you can't make it, you need to pick up the worksheet and cabbage juice now.

Happy Holidays!

Hi everyone!

Today's food was gingerbread cookies (from a mix) and hot chocolate with extra cocoa powder. Cocoa is thought to have health benefits, including improving brain functioning.

And here's a video of a swimming anglerfish! Although people have examined numerous dead anglerfish, this video shows one swimming naturally in her normal habitat.

Glasswing butterflies

Today's food was cranberry sauce muffins. There's also a whole grain, oats, brown sugar version over at Serious Eats.

And now, here are lots of glasswing butterfly pictures. Scientists are still not sure how or why the wings are transparent.

Cookie videos

Hey everyone!

Today's food was storebought cookies for the animation kids over at Ashland library. Check out their videos!

Today's science fact is the slingjaw wrasse's existence.

You can probably tell why it's called that.

The slingjaw wrasse's telescoping jaw doesn't just bring the mouth closer to the prey. It actually creates suction, pulling in their food.

Mind-controlled robot arms!

Doesn't that look amazing? This is a robot hand that can sense the electric pulses in muscles, so people who've lost their hands can put it on and control it just by thinking what they want, and there are even tiny motors provide feedback to the existing so they can "feel" how hard they're gripping.



Today's food was crumb-topped apple pumpkin pie, minus the crumbs. I chose this pie because the very first published recipe for pumpkin pie was to cut up chunks of pumpkin, mix it with slices of apple and sugar, and bake. What we call pumpkin pie today was originally called pumpkin pudding.

Banana peel plastics!

Elif Bilgin, a sixteen year old from Turkey, discovered a way to turn banana peels into bioplastic.



Today's food was Martha Stewart's cranberry cobbler, with extra sugar and butter. I'd also suggest cutting the cranberries up so they're less tart. Happy Thanksgiving!

Real-life animated drawings

A cool look at how mixing animation and real life stop motion can produce surprising effects. The clear plastic sheets being held up are called cells and are what animators like Disney relied on to produce their movies.

The American Chestnut (and you)

Hey, everyone!

The Fall semester of S.E.T. School is now halfway over! The students have all worked hard and hopefully had fun as well. It's great to see everyone's eager faces when they come to class.

We had some spooky science fun at our Halloween party: slime, spider eggs, strobe lights, and a laughing robot skull. A big thanks to the parents who helped out with food and activities!

And students have made their first Web Design pages, as well as several short videos in Science of Special Effects class.

Now, I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about chestnuts, a traditional food this time of year, and just becoming available in the grocery stores.




But the chestnuts in the stores today aren't the chestnuts in the song.

After the ice age ended, the native Americans on the eastern half of this continent found themselves living in forests thick with chestnut trees. The trunk could be as thick as ten feet in diameter and the tree grew to a height of one hundred feet with massive branches. These majestic trees greeted the Vikings when they arrived thousands of years later, and when European colonists arrived in America hundreds of years after that, they too marveled at the American chestnut.

Historically, the American chestnut made up around one-fourth of the trees in the eastern forest, making it by far the most common tree species. A mature tree produces an enormous quantity of nuts, and does so every year. Most nut trees aren't so consistent. Oak trees are one of the worst, with trees all producing enormous numbers of acorns one year and none at all the next. Any creature trying to live on acorns as their main food source would find themselves starving one year, so from the tiny mouse to the giant bear, animals relied on chestnut production for a stable food source.

Humans relied on it as well, with many poor rural communities depending on the chestnut for their livelihood, selling the nuts and making everything from houses to furniture from the wood. Chestnut wood is much lighter than oak and almost as strong, and it can last for centuries without rotting.

Other parts of the tree are just as vital to the forest ecosystem. The leaves are much more nutritious than most tree leaves are, making them the preferred food of many insects. As the leaves decompose in autumn, they enrich the soil and create the type of soil associated with woodlands. Many shade-dwelling plants also evolved to shelter under the tree's huge branches.

They even benefit aquatic ecosystems. Leaves from maples turn the water brown or even black. This blocks the light, preventing plants from photosynthesizing and suffocating many aquatic animals. American chestnut leaves, in contrast, don't stain the water, and their incredibly rot-resistant branches fall to create hollows for fish and other creatures, as well as making much better dam material for beavers.

In 1904, a scientist observed an American chestnut tree's bark had begun to split and brown.

The damage spread rapidly. A deadly fungus had infected the tree, destroying the cambium layer under the bark. This is the layer containing the tubes that convey food and water to nourish the tree. Without the cambium layer, the tree dies of thirst.

It was chestnut blight, a fungus that had reached America from one of the Japanese chestnut trees being imported at the time. Japanese chestnut trees can fight off the disease, but no American chestnut survived it. The fungal spores spread by wind. The disease expanded fifty miles a year. Within a few decades, the American chestnut were dead.

Some of the long-dead trees can still be found standing today, a testament to the strength of the wood and its legendary resistance to rot.

A few trees survived in remote areas outside the usual range. They had been planted in places as far as California, and for a while, they were outside the blight's range. The last remaining large stand of American chestnut trees is in Wisconson, planted by a settler from the east. Unfortunately, the blight finally reached them in 1987. Since then, scientists have tried desperately to save the trees but can only slow the spread.

Many attempts have been made to restore the American chestnut to its original range. Replanting wild chestnuts failed, as none of them possessed any resistance against the blight. Crossbreeding the American chestnut to its fungus-resisting Chinese cousin, a project began in the 1920s, also failed to produce trees that could survive the disease. Finally scientists isolated a gene in wheat that nullifies acid, which the fungus uses to devour the tree. They gave this gene to American chestnut trees in the hopes they'd survive an infection.

And for the first time in a hundred years, they lived. Not only can they survive the disease, they're not even weakened by it, shrugging off the fungus that killed billions of trees. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this is that the transgenic trees have not had to sacrifice any of their original DNA the way hybrid crosses would. If we spread this new tree across the country, it'll be as if the chestnut blight never happened.

If you think that sounds like something you want to support, then spread the word about the Ten Thousand Chestnuts Challenge, a fundraiser aiming to produce 10,000 new chestnut trees to begin reforesting.

Summer Week 6&7!

Week 6 was SWEET! The older kids had a delicious time learning about the history and science of sugar in Sugar Science. They started with the oldest source of sweet goodness, honey, and made some honey ball candies. They got to see, feel and taste nine different types of sugar, like raw sugar, coconut sugar, brown sugar, agave nectar, etc. They tasted their way to modern creations like corn syrup, and made a model of the molecular structure of a sugar molecule. They learned that at different temperatures sugar molecules begin to lose water, and this changes the appearance and texture of the sugar. The students experienced the soft ball, hard ball, soft crack and hard crack states of sugar. And, of course, they learned how to make candies like marshmallows, caramels and lollipops by carefully controlling the cooking temperature of the sugar.

They spent the other half of the morning programming using Scratch, a programming language developed at MIT. Making colorful games with the program was a popular activity and the children enjoyed sharing techniques and playing each others' games!














In the afternoon, the older students learned the engineering concept of hydraulics. They spent the week exploring how water under pressure can move devices, and then constructed mechanical arms controlled by pumps made of syringes and tubing. These arms were a big hit and the students enjoyed challenging each other to hydraulic arm wrestling!

Meanwhile, the younger students learned all about volcanoes. They spent the first two days building and painting a model of a volcano. On Day 3 they hit the lab and experimented with different ingredients for making the best "lava" to erupt in their volcano. Each team came up with a recipe, and the class voted on the favorite. On Day 4 they whipped up a big vat of lava and took our volcanoes outside to erupt them! They decorated the volcanoes with dinosaurs, who soon got buried in bubbling lava.

In the afternoon, the younger students took up their wands and enrolled at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry! First the new students were sorted into Houses, with Gryffindor being the most popular. They learned wizard secrets about the Sorcerer's Stone, how to care for magical animals, and cook up a delicious witch's brew! They also decorated a cake with characters from the Harry Potter books and we celebrated Harry Potter's birthday on July 31st!

Week 7 was busy with construction and contraptions. The Jr. Architects learned about bridges and were challenged to build a bridge that could span two chairs and hold up at least one bottle of water. They built the highest tower possible using a limited supply of materials. They also explored an unorthodox building material, balloons! They built a fun house out of lots of twisty balloons.


In the afternoon, they explored the concept of buoyancy by molding boats out of clay, very tricky! They also made submarines, balloon-powered cars, and traditional paper air planes, and cylinder gliders. On the final day, they explored Newton's Third Law as they investigated the balance between fuel, weight and pressure when shooting water rockets.

Just what do doctors do? The older campers got to see for themselves in Med School. They learned about diseases of all sorts and their effect on the human body. They studied bones, learning about the importance of vitamin D and calcium in the diet (don't want to get rickets, do we?). They studied how muscles work and constructed models of hands with tendon-controlled joints. They dissected and examined a calf's heart, and learned about heart disease and how to read an EKG. The heart and lungs are closely tied, and the students made a model of the lung.

In the afternoon, it was Motor Madness as the older students worked on projects that taught them about motors, batteries, and wiring and how to put it all together in motorized contraptions.
More pictures from the week:

Summer Week 4&5!

Week 4 at SET was all about the good guys.

In CSI Detective the older kids learned how to investigate a crime scene. They gathered and analyzed evidence using techniques like blood typing, fingerprint matching, and chemical analysis. After lunch, in Secret Agent Academy, they practiced crawling between laser tripwires, slipping out of handcuffs, wearing disguises, decoding encrypted messages, and how to use their brain to solve tricky situations they might end up in. On the last day all their training came together as they carried out the mission to thwart sinister Dr. Z and his zombie army. And, of course, they learned how to avoid getting caught in the first place. They used these abilities on the final day to make it past the sinister Dr. Z's traps and foil his plans.

Meanwhile, the younger class learn how to harness the sun, wind and water in Green Energy, creating such useful items as windmills and solar cookers. Then in Hero Quest, they battled mighty monsters, struggled past traps, and rescued a baby dragon, all with the power of math.

Then in Week 5, the younger class was been inducted into the many mysteries of sLiMe! They've made (and hopefully made it home with!) their various creations, from gaks and to ooblecks, which have also featured in some of this week's stop motion animations! Then in the afternoon, they learned about sneaking, decoding, and zombie-stopping in Secret Agent Academy, and finally made their way through the laser challenge!

Meanwhile, the older set have been working on saving the planet through green energy, exploring everything from solar-energy smores to saltwater-powered cars, then in the afternoon they created amazingly inventive ways of keeping an egg intact in Egg Drop Challenge, from shock-absorbing suspension to paper cone crumple zones.

And all of them have worked hard at Stop Motion Animation, and their videos are up on our Youtube channel! Check out the great job everyone's done!