4-H Delivers

Two Rock 4-H Club, Sonoma County California National Youth Science Experiment

On October 2, 2010, Two Rock 4-H (Sonoma County) held an outreach event at Walnut Park, Petaluma, California in conjunction with the 4-H National Youth Science Experiment “4-H20”. In this event, we had the participation of 14, 4-H primary members (ages 7-12), one junior leader volunteer, one adult leader volunteer and seven adult participants. We had the participation of approximately 60 youth in the science experiment and our robotics project “the CO2 Turtlebot”.

Our Project
For this event, we had a booth focusing on three displays that ran a common theme of looking at the effects of CO2 in the environment. In the first display, we had our custom made Legos Mindstorms NXT robot which measured atmospheric CO2 gas and “drew” the results on a large sheet of paper. The concept was to have each participant “blow” into the Turtlebot's sensor and have the robot take a reading and draw the results. Participants could then sign their name on the paper making an interactive mural for all to see. The Turtlebot worked perfect, many thanks to the hours of development shared by our long distance collaborator, whom heard about our project on an online Legos forum. Subsequently an online article was published on the remote collaboration process and how well Legos worked for this project. Links to these articles can be found here: http://rovbuilder.blogspot.com.

Our second display was the 4-H2O science experiment itself (shown above). We had a large table set up so that we could conduct experiments with up to five participants at a time. We also had experiment kits for approximately 80 persons. Our third and last display was a “solar workstation” where 4-H primary members showed the public their building skills by previewing some of the projects we are working on in the 2010-11 4-H season. Among these were a solar race car and electricity producing wind turbine.

Event Day
Our group partnered with the Petaluma Farmers Market and we were kindly donated a very good space for our booth. It was an exceptionally warm fall day and though our turnout at the event was good. Our group also had planned participation with the Friends of the Petaluma River, a local non-profit with concerns about preserving the local Petaluma River watershed. We displayed promotional materials from “Cool The Earth”, a national non-profit which teaches youth about the effects of global warming and what individuals can do to reduce their carbon footprint. This turned out to be a perfect collaboration for our project and one we look forward to continuing.

Summary
Overall, this event was the first time our local 4-H club participated in a science experiment and many of the kids and parents whom stopped by our booth were impressed that 4-H was so progressive in its curriculum. We were always explaining to the public that 4-H is more than showing rabbits and chickens and that the SET initiative does promote engagement in kids to learn more about science and technology. The instructional materials provided by 4-H on both its well crafted website and 4-H Mall, made conducing the experiment easy for even novice participants. Because of this event, we recruited two cross over youth from neighboring town of Sonoma to participate in this years Two Rock 4-H SET projects. We look forward to other outreach events like this in the future.

Author: David Bell, Sonoma County 4-H Volunteer, dbell@sfsu.edu