So we arrived with less stuff but with more ideas… and we found our booth carpeted again! Ugh… well, we’ll just have to do what we did back at GHEA to get the hovercraft to work right.

This room was the largest carpeted ballroom we’ve been in (CHAP in Harrisburg was larger, only it had 7,500 llamas in there only the week before, so it was more of an indoor rodeo stadium), and it just took me by surprise! The ceilings were way high (which is good for a rocket-gal like myself) and the Florida staff were efficient at getting our stuff ready for us.

Funny side note – Picture this – we’ve been traveling all day (about 3,000 miles), lugging around about 400 pounds of equipment into the tiniest rental car (think European-style) we’ve ever seen, and we get to our destination hotel at MIDNIGHT. When we arrived, it had been my birthday for only 7 minutes (it was 12:07 AM). The girls at the front desk were super-friendly, and we joked about finding some chocolate cake to celebrate, seeing as it was my day and all (at midnight, no less!). We tripped upstairs to our room and crashed… only to be woken at 9AM (not to bad) by room service, who ushered in a (I kid you not) chocolate CANOE filled to the brim with about 15 pounds of chocolate, a chilled bottle of champagne with two chilled glasses, and a note – signed “From the Front Desk Night Crew”! WOWOWOW!! (The large bouquet of flowers arrived about 10 minutes later… no kidding.)

Okay – so more about the show – we were determined to help people any way we could, so I stayed up all night for the past week (except when we flew in) trying to organize all my ideas and thoughts from over the years about how to best teach people to do what I do. It was like trying to take notes from a world-famous chef that keeps all the recipes in her head! I had a good start, though, and tested it out with the people from this show.

The most common things people wanted to know were, “Are you new?” To which we’d have to say, “Well, yes, to FPEA, and no, we’ve been teaching science to kids for about 12 years now.” The next question always caught me by surprise, “So where have you been all this time?”

Not long after I started demonstrating how to teach science that sticks to your brain without a whole lot of effort (I kind of like that title!), we were told to stop doing the fire demonstrations. The first thing I said when I started my workshop (in another part of the building, away from everyone else), was “Well, they told me we had to stop doing the fire demonstrations in our booth”. The audience surprised me by ‘boo-ing’… So I slapped down the propane torch and added, “Well, they didn’t say anything about not doing them in our workshop!” Applause and cheers! We had such a fun time – I love sharing science with anyone who has a set of ears.

This was the biggest room we’ve been in for a workshop. It had seats for about 250 people, and by the time I started talking, there were people standing all along the back wall and out the door. I felt absolutely filled with passion and gratitude that these people were taking steps to improving their kid’s interest/education in science, and I did my best to serve them. I borrowed a piece of equipment for my talk (the TSA has swiped mine from my suitcase on the trip over), and of course it didn’t work during the show! That’ll teach me to borrow stuff when I’m doing live demos…

Happy Birthday to me! Yes, on my birthday, we’re traveling to our next show in Orlando, Florida. And it’s the biggest show yet – about 16,000 attendees. The whole trip, I’ve been revising how and where to add new ideas and experiments into the show, and I feel good about how we’re delivering our message to people – about how to take their kid from Zero to Einstein without a whole lot of effort. We’re going to set up tomorrow, and this time I’ve dropped about 150 pounds of equipment and shipped it home. We’re going to try doing more with less and see how it goes.

~Aurora

Nervous? Worried?! I always am before an event, especially a new kind of event, but it’s seems so silly now. Yes, we were ON FIRE at this event! The new stuff about the psychology about how and why kids learn was an instant SUCCESS!! We must have had hundreds of people at our booth most of the time, including the security guards who LOVED what we were doing and wouldn’t let anyone interrupt us during the flame demonstrations. It was such a wonderful feeling when the crowds cheered and wanted more, and I had more value to give them! They took notes, laughed, and launched rockets all at once. Since we’ve only been teaching kids up until now, we needed to find a way to reach and teach adults, and it looks like we’re doing it!

Funny side note – at the end of one of our talks near the end of the show, someone dashed up to the front of the line and shoved a piece of paper into my hands with a hasty explanation. A little worried we’d done something offensive to someone (how often to you get formal-looking letter thrust at you just after a performance?) and then I laughed when I read it. It an invitation to speak at their next convention! The whole crowd cheered and we truly felt we had succeeded in our top goals of making a difference and having fun.

We’re celebrating tonight!
~Aurora

We made it to the CHAP convention, which starts tomorrow, and we’re more than a bit nervous!  We changed more than a few things in our booth and especially in the demonstrations I do, and there’s no workshop at this location.  In fact, when I asked about workshops, they told me that those were reserved for real speakers only.  Okay, I thought – no problem, as I am not a real speaker anyway.  I’ll get get up and do my science demonstrations and help people learn science from my milk crate talks in my booth,

But that’s not the part that I am nervous about… we learned that they are expecting over 10,000 people at this event… more than we’ve seen at a show yet!  And although Amy’s here, she’s still not up to par, so I’ve been doing all the heavy lifting and setup while she rests, and wondering why I didn’t pick a ‘lighter’ topic than physics (maybe I do shows with just light next time!).

So we’re all set up and ready for when it opens tomorrow… I hope these new ideas I came up with reach some of my audience and make a difference to them in how they teach their kids!!

Wow – Amy just called yesterday and said she had a ticket and asked to meet her in Baltimore!  Yea!  Good thing I didn’t shoot straight through to Harrisburg, PA in my hurry to get on the road!

Okay, so originally Amy and I were going to have a fun ‘girls’ trip up the coast, but seeing as half of us was missing, I decided to reroute and hit as many science attractions as I could while still making good time up the coast. I made it today from Atlanta, GA to Richmond, VA (in one day), stopping only to see the Science Museum in Richmond (which I highly recommend!) It was very green the whole trip up the highway. On the coast of California where I live, there’s more variety – it’s be desert one minute, redwood forest the next, ocean beach the next… it changes a bit as you go up. There was about 500 miles of beautiful greenery all around me. And no billboards – that was such a welcomed surprise!

On the flip side, I got to refine my ideas into more of a talk as I would talk to myself for eight uninterrupted hours on the road, trying out all sorts of ways of putting things together. Most people don’t know this about me, but I really don’t consider myself to be a “speaker”. Actually, far from it. I don’t prepare a speech before I get up on stage… more of a rough outline in the form of props and demonstrations, and I just get up there and “do it”… I figure I’m more of an “explainer” of why stuff happens and all the variations you can do with one simple experiment.

That’s really how the fire shows started. Years ago, I was teaching a class in rocketry, and one day a kid asked me how come toilet paper burned faster than regular paper. I was intrigued… that he noticed more than just the burst of flames (as most kids do), but interested enough about the process that he not only noticed something, but asked a question about it. We tried all sorts of things to vary the burn rates that day, and now it’s the basis of our fire demonstrations.

I love what I do!

~Aurora

Hey everyone! Georgia was HOT – and different, in a fun and challenging way. It was the first time I’d ever worked a crowd without Amy since she came on board, and I was definitely missing her energy and spark. That and there was CARPET everywhere! This made our hovercraft demonstration and fire shows a bit more challenging, but the good part was no one seemed to care about fireballs blazing in to the air. The crowd was lively and full of energy, and at one point during the workshop, the energetic woman helping with the fire show that was holding the propane torch told the audience how she used torches to to find caterpillar’s nests! The audience laughed and nodded in agreement – I guess having never been to the South before, this was a problem I was not familiar with! *grin*

Something unusual has been happening at the past two shows. Now, we expected to be a bit low-key in the beginning, since no one knows who we are yet (remember, it’s our first time traveling out of state), but this really strange thing has been happening… as soon as we start setting up (pulling rockets out of boxes, setting up the lightning machine, and I even had a robot zoom away on me as I lifted it out of the box), people flew right over to find out who we were and what we were about. After that settled out, their kids came over and stuck to us all weekend.

I had a brilliant idea halfway through the GHEA show – I offered the kids any kit in the booth if they helped us out during the show. We had over 30 kids scrambling over themselves to help out anyone who had a problem, question, or just wanted to see our “stuff”. It was a neat feeling – we were all suddenly one big family in this thing together, barely keeping up with the demand (we were one of the most popular booths), and we definitely needed the help! In the end, we all “won” – kids got their feet wet with teaching and helping the grown-ups (not to mention how great it looked when the parents asked the kids who long they had known us, to which they could answer: “Since yesterday”… and then they continued to question them with things like “So why are you here at THIS booth? What’s so great about it?” and hearing it from kids we just met made their message even more clear), and we were able to handle the influx of crowds with all the extra help.

At one point, I was up on my milk crate doing my rocketry fire show in my (carpeted) booth, and there was a crowd gathered (I really didn’t know how many until afterwards – I usually only focus on the first few rows of people), and when I looked up, I saw two HUGE cameras… one said “ABC” and the other said “NBC”!!! All I remember is gulping quickly and making doubly sure that whatever I was doing was going to work right! (The next day, other vendors came up to tell us they saw us on the local news that night!) WOW!!!

When my boss showed me the video, I saw there were not the usual 20-50 people, but about 200 people all standing around, even the vendors from other booths had turned to watch me perform. I always feel so honored when this happens… after all, it’s the audience that puts me up there in the first place, and if they didn’t think I was worth watching, I wouldn’t be there.

That night, when I went home, I was determined to bring more value to my audience than just blowing things up, something they could really take home with them and use… so I have been outlining the top things I would do when I teach science if I was homeschooling my own children. I took a notebook out and just started a “brain dump” of all the things I know about teaching science – not only the technical stuff but the “how” and “why” stuff, too. The notebook is already half-filled.

I’ll let you know more as it comes!

~Aurora