Science Unwrapped

So, up in Logan, they are doing something pretty fun. Once per month, on the last Friday, they have a public lecture by a 'local' scientist, followed by an activity for the public. They call it Science Unwrapped.

I was invited to give a talk about 'The Lives of the Stars'... no, not THOSE stars. ; ) The kind that fuse hydrogen into helium. Shane and I put our heads together, and came up with what I thought was a really fun activity. We modified the stellar evolution flowchart to be a little simpler (leaving out some of the intricacies about which element gets fused when), and then turned it into a scavenger hunt! They could walk around the quad, and fill in the flowchart as they followed the branch points to figure out the answers. Shane put the whole thing 'to scale' in time, so that people could really get a sense that stuff happens at the beginning and the end, but in the middle, there's just not much going on for a REALLY long time. He made up some spiffy posters and handouts---apparently, his copy center charges much less than ours. At the middle of the main sequence part of the lifetime, there was lemonade and cookies, which fits in with the current age of the Sun, and the fact that now, for this tiny smitch of time, lemonade and cookies exist in the Universe.

Anyway. A rousing success.

Today, I'm getting final details taken care of for this teacher thing next week. Hooray for Kinko's!