First of all, once we started out we all had to make sure we had brought everything. Once we had unboxed everything, we had to set it all up. We were pretty confident about our experiment since we went to Harmon's house to test it all out and fortunately we had no problems. Harmon, Shawn, and I had to go fill up trays of water for our experiment, Soap Boat Racing. Little did we know, the trays happened to be very wobbly and so we had to walk carefully and slowly so that the water did not spill. Thankfully, we managed to fill them up and make it back to our station without any problems. Once we finally got set up, we had to move our location since we were told it would have been a better location. We were told we were going to be given a signal telling us when the kids were about to show up, so we used the extra time to test our experiment to see if everything was in good shape. The first 10 minutes, we did not get any single participant, we were getting kinda worried. Thankfully, Eric from another group and I raced and when one of us won, my group loudly congratulated me and it brought participants to our experiment. We were now on track.
Out of nowhere, we started to gain a lot of participants. Jonathan and I were in charge of telling the kids what to do and set up the races, Shawn was making sure we had enough water, Billy had to cut out the boat shapes (since our scissors were sharp and we had to take safety precautions,) and Harmon was refilling the water trays. We had the kids choose their desired soap, boat, and place the soap onto the boat. When they were ready, they would each place their boat on the tray at the count of 3. We would then cheer for them, often a little bit too loud.
You could tell based on the kids faces, as well as the parents, that they were having a good time racing their boats. The parents would ask us the science behind the experiment, and we would all summarize the concept of surface tension and the effects of soap. There was one kid in particular that got very happy when he realized he had won. The overall atmosphere was really exciting and fun.
The event went on for 3 hours but it had felt like forever. Despite the hard work we all put in it, we all had fun. We were all given this opportunity to help out the community and teach elementary students about science as well as allowing them to have fun while doing it. This really was an honor and I am glad I was able to take part in it. After our group had cleaned up our station, we would go around to see other people's experiments to see what they had taught the kids. Every single experiment had seemed very interesting and I am glad the kids were able to participate in each one. Overall, this was a very fun experience and I hope to do something similar to this in the future.
