Click here to subscribe today or Login.
WILKES-BARRE — Like her fellow students, 9-year-old Princess Franklin donned the safety goggles and watched intently as teacher Karen Baranoski tossed a lit match into a flask before setting a hard-boiled egg on the seemingly too-narrow neck. The egg suddenly plunked to the bottom of the Pyrex.
From then on, Princess seemed to take to the science lessons with ease, balancing a ping pong ball on the air stream of a hair dryer, making raisins “dance” in a cup of soda, and building a parachute out of four strands of yarn and a napkin.
Does she want to be a scientist when she grows up? Princess, one of some 60 elementary and middle school students attending a science summer camp at Wilkes University Wednesday, gave a serious-faced nod.
The two-day camp came courtesy of the SHINE after-school program. Short for Schools and Homes In Education, SHINE uses a mix of private and public money to provide science-rich opportunities to area students. After 10 years in neighboring Carbon County, it came to Luzerne County last fall, making this its inaugural summer event.
A retired teacher, Baranoski breezed through a series of experiments like the egg-into-flask trick (the match burns up oxygen, making the air pressure inside the bottle lower, sucking in the egg).
She let the students touch eggs that had been soaked in vinegar for days, turning the insides rubbery and the shell into a translucent skin (The ascetic acid dissolves the calcium carbonate in the shell.)
She filled a bowl to the brim with water, asking how many pennies she could put in before it spilled over. The answer, as she proved by plunking them one at time: 112 (surface tension keeps the water intact even as it domes above the bowl rim).
And she asked the students what would happen if a candle burned in a jar set upside in liquid, then demonstrated. The liquid rose higher in the jar (that oxygen-burning low pressure again), and Austin Franklin, 7, yelped “I was right!”
The campers then took turns at different stations. One showed how raisins dropped in carbonated soda would rise and fall several times as the bubbles attached to the dried fruit, lifting it before popping.
“I love raisins,” one girl beamed.
“Well you can take a box, if you want,” Baranoski replied, proving science can be informative and tasty.
After less than an hour flitting about the room learning cause and effect — Kolyha Garcia, 8, picked up a ping pong ball that slipped from the hair dryer’s air stream and observed “it’s hot now!” — the class wrapped up and prepared to move to another room in the Cohen Science Center for a different set of lessons.
Most students had already begun filing out with their napkin parachutes and safety goggles, but Princess hung back a moment, unnoticed, staring at another egg sitting atop another flask waiting for another group of students.
The silent future scientist glanced about, gave it a good push down the neck, lifted her hand and saw it spring back up.
