From Parking Deck to Adventure Halls – the Grand Lobby Experience

By: Ruth Terry, Manager of Ticketing

It is very difficult to convince a three year old that there are more fun things to see and do after being introduced to the flying, chiming, zooming, and leaping balls of Vulcan’s Dream Machine. The art piece is the first sight you see when you step from the elevators from the parking deck into the Grand Lobby. It is sometimes difficult to convince older children (and even adults) that more levels of exciting activities wait around the curve of the spacious lobby.

Once you are able to pull away from “The Ball Machine,” other distractions pull you farther into the center. High screens of constantly changing information about what the McWane Science Center offers may catch your eye with a robot talking about having a birthday party at the McWane Science Center. Or you might see information about the latest exhibit or an upcoming exhibit.

A few steps on are three larger screens, displaying a variety of information. You might see lightning streaking across a stage while an unseen audience screams with delight; or a balloon exploding in light, the audience gasping with excitement. “Where and when can I see THAT?” you want to know. The center board has a map of Level One and the times of the day’s programs listed. On the final screen are the IMAX® films with their current show times. If you miss the IMAX times on the information screens, they are posted behind the ticketing counter.
The screens at ticketing keep up the flow of information and excitement. The prices are listed and the robot is there too, piquing your children’s interest while you receive all the vital information about your visit from the ticketing representative. On one screen, the robot will let you know about birthday parties and membership at the McWane Science Center. On the other, your child will be watching for him to pop up, sneaking peeks over and around the prices. The robot, by the way, is MAC, McWane Science Center’s robot who will occasionally roll around Level One, greeting visitors and talking about what is happening at the McWane Science Center that day.

Past the ticketing counter are more interesting distractions before you step into the Adventure Halls. First there is the IMAX® Concession Stand, where the smell of fresh popcorn wafts, tempting you to grab a bag (please remember though, there is no food or drink allowed in the Adventure Halls.) Then there is the MAXFLIGHT 2000, where you are turned topsy-turvy in a simulated roller coaster ride, if you are at least 48 inches tall. Above MAXFLIGHT 2000 is a net. Why is there a net above our lobby? It’s under the High Cycle to catch falling objects, not falling people (no matter what a ten year old might tell his little sister.) And there is the vortex, the amazing gravity powered coin spin which is not only fun to do, but helps fund the fun!

If you can resist the pull of Really Cool Stuff, our gift store, you are finally in the Adventure Halls. Four levels of fun and educational exhibits. The long journey from Parking Deck to Adventure Halls is complete. Now you only have to decide what to do first!

Science Fiction to Science Reality

By: Ben Moon, Director of Space and Technology
Technology is like the brother of magic. At least it seems that way. Everyday humans are making scientific leaps and bounds, turning science fiction into science reality. It’s really quite fun to follow the progress. Let’s talk about some recent advancements shall we?

We can turn oily algae into fuel. We can grow plastics from plants. We can slow down a beam of light and stop it in its tracks. We can grow diamonds in a lab in just a few days. We can video chat with people on the other side of the world, for free.

While it’s interesting to talk about this stuff, it’s more fun to see it in action. So I will present to you some new technologies with video and pictures to showcase them.

First up: Touchable Holography. This technology utilizes a concave mirror to create holographic images, Wiimotes to track the user, and and “Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display” that allows you to actually feel the holographic images. Crazy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-P1zZAcPuw

Eyeborg. Rob Spence, a one-eyed Canadian filmmaker and Kosta Grammatis, his engineer friend have created an eyeball camera that fits into Spence’s empty eye socket. They’re making a movie from that perspective. Weird. http://eyeborgproject.com/home.php

Super computing (for real). Graphene is an extremely strong experimental material with extremely high conductivity. It's essentially a one-atom-thick honeycomb fabric of carbon. It’s better than silicone for computer chips and MIT researchers claim that it may be able to boost the clock speed of computer chips into the 500-GHz to 1,000-GHz range. You’re overclocked 8-GHz silicon chip in liquid nitrogen just shed a tear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YbS-YyvCl4&feature=related

Electromagnetic Railgun. Current naval ship guns generate about 9 megajoules of muzzle energy. The electromagnetic railgun developed at Naval Surface Warfare Division in Dahlgren, Virginia is an 8-megajoule prototype, but the one to be used on Navy ships will generate a massive 64 megajoules. The top-secret gun the Navy used to destroy Devastator in Transfomers: Revenge of the Fallen was not science fiction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54aLcC3G74 and http://www.nswc.navy.mil/ET/railgun/

DARPA is developing something their calling “Silent Talk” for soldiers. Using an EEG to read brain waves, they’re attempting to analyze "pre-speech" thoughts , map people's EEG patterns to his / her individual words, then see if those patterns are common to all people. If they are, then the team will move on to developing a way to transmitting those patterns to another person. It’s basically telepathy! http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push/#comments

The Sun…On Earth! There is a laser housed at the National Ignition Facility (or NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, that is the size of three football fields. It will aim to create a "star" on earth by focusing 192 beams at a pea-sized target, generating temperatures over 100 million degrees and pressure over 100 billion times the earth's atmosphere. The process will create nuclear fusion -- the reaction that powers the sun and the stars. Hot! http://www.physorg.com/news162827599.html and https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/nif/about.php

Allow these things to mystify you until mid November when the Large Hadron Collider creates a mini-black hole that will swallow the Earth. Cheers!

Contributor Profile:
Ben Moon is the Manager of Space and Technology at McWane. He is a total geek and loves space, shiny things, technology, gadgets, video games, sci-fi and zombies. He is married and just had his first child! His favorite movie is The Rocketeer. He wishes he had telekinesis.

Birds of a Feather - Part 3

We have now arrived at a very interesting point where the discoveries of the past two decades have illustrated how difficult it is to define exactly where feathered theropod dinosaurs leave off and birds begin. Many of the features once thought to be unique to birds, like a wishbone, for example, have been identified in a variety of dinosaurs. Even teeth are still found in many otherwise normal-looking Late Cretaceous birds such as Ichthyornis from the chalk deposits of Alabama. At the moment, the acquisition of fully powered flight appears to be the dividing line between theropods and birds, although even that is tentative. At least one lineage of theropod dinosaurs, the alvarezsaurids, that includes the bizarre Mononychus and Shuvuuia, each sporting a single finger on each tiny but powerfully built arm, have the appearance of “vestigial” wings that belonged to a once flighted bird that has re-adapted the wing into a warped sort of arm. This implies that flight may have evolved more than once within the theropods because the alvarezsaurids are not closely related to the lineage of theropods that share the most features with birds. Essentially, you should think of birds as flighted theropods that survived the extinction event 65 million years ago (the K/T boundary extinctions). After the K/T boundary extinctions, birds had finally evolved to the point that they had a more bird-like appearance, having lost teeth, the long tail, and the hind foot sickle-claw.

But birds didn’t quit being scary with the disappearance of the rest of the dinosaurs. At least two groups of birds became top predators after the K/T extinctions in the absence of any competing large mammal carnivores. Diatryma (Gastornis) was a large, seven-foot-plus tall flightless bird that dominated North America and Europe for several million years after the K/T, eating the ancestors of horses and whatever other mammals they could catch. Later, the flightless phorusrhacids, otherwise known as the Terror Birds, ran the plains of South America between about 62 and 2 million years ago, eating llamas and pretty much whatever else they wanted. One phorusrhacid, the nine-foot-tall Titanis walleri, made it across Central America and its fossils have been found in Florida. As a personal note, this is one of my “paleo daydreams”. You can’t get from Central America to Florida without crossing through southern Alabama. Every time it rains, I get this mental image of a Titanis skeleton eroding out of the bank of some stream in south Alabama,…

We call the Cenozoic, the time period dating from the end of the dinosaur era 65 million years ago to the present, the “age of mammals”. And it’s true that the top predators in the terrestrial realm today are mostly mammals. But there are 10,000 species of living birds, and only 4600 species of mammals, so dinosaurs are still doing quite well (although a recently released report suggests that human activities may be accomplishing what the dinosaur-killing asteroid collision could not – namely driving many species to extinction). There’s even the chance that traditional-looking dinosaurs could make a comeback. Several times over the past 20 or 30 years various research groups have shown that some of the primitive characteristics of birds ancestors are still locked away in a birds DNA. Now there are people trying to use our increasing knowledge of genetics to “reverse engineer” a dinosaur, or at least a bird with some very dinosaur-like characteristics, from a bird. I’m going to refer to such a creature as a “dino-bird” in the following paragraphs.

For example, there is a mutation in chickens known as talpid, which has teeth and jaws, not a beak. There is also a stage in embryonic chicken development with a long tail containing 16 vertebrae, very dinosaur-like, very un-chicken-like. The genes that control these mutations can be identified and theoretically, if they can be “turned on” during the development of the embryo in such a manner that they do not kill the chick embryo by interfering with later developmental stages, one could get a chicken with teeth and a long tail. Then there’s the Hoatzin, an odd-looking relative of the cuckoos that nests in the seasonally flooded forests of the Amazon. Hoatzin chicks are born with 3 claws on their hands that project off the front edge of the wing that they use to climb up small trees to escape snakes. They later lose the claws, but obviously the genes for hand claws in birds are still locked away in their genetic code, it’s just that those genes have been repressed. Of course whether or not bioengineering such an animal is ethical is another story, but my prediction is that someone somewhere is going to do it. And this raises all sorts of questions of a profound nature that scientists and perhaps society at large should begin to ponder, and here I offer but a few:

What exactly will a dino-bird look like, will we call embryonic dino-birds “chicks” (somehow when I think of the fuzzy little yellow duck chick I got one Easter when I was about 5 years old, I can’t quite reconcile the two images), will we have to redo the old expression about something being “rare as hen’s teeth”, will they get along well with house cats (my prediction is no), could they be house-trained, and what would that be like (ever smelled a chicken house?), how much will the vet charge to “declaw” your dino-bird?

Finally, a couple of closing thoughts; the next time you look at that bird on your feeder that you’ve let run out of food, or cast a disparaging glance at that scruffy-looking pigeon on the sidewalk, just remember – there’s a little of T. rex in them. Show some respect. And if we ever do invent a time machine and travel back to the age of dinosaurs I have one last prediction – dinosaurs will taste like chicken.

Contributor Profile:
James Lamb is a native Birminghamster with a nearly life-long interest in fossils. He collected his first fossil when he was 5 years old. Friends and family members assure him he has not matured much since then. James is curator of paleontology at McWane Science Center, and would like to one day see the absolute treasure trove of Alabama's fossil heritage revealed to the public. When not at work he wishes he were in the field digging up fossils. At home he enjoys reading, jogging, woodworking, and carving. He has been informed that he is in the habit of telling atrocious puns, but this comes as a surprise to him. James describes himself as a "science nerd".

True Joy Means Making a Difference

Joy.

The world needs more of it. You can provide it.

When I first got into fundraising, I thought it would be great helping people live better lives. The best part of my job, however, is witnessing the joy donors and volunteers experience when they shared their resources to help others.

I hear the sounds of joy every day at McWane Science Center. Sounds we wouldn’t hear if it weren’t for generous donors who provide exciting, fun, educational exhibits and programs.

If you have been a part of providing this joy for the 11 years that McWane has existed, thank you. We have depended on corporations, foundations, government entities and some individuals who have made major gifts. But Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.

McWane is a thriving organization in terms of the experience, attendance and memberships. April and June of this year saw record attendance. Memberships are growing, yet there’s room to grow. Might I unabashedly say it’s a great deal if you come just twice a year?

Lots of folks don’t realize that McWane Science Center is a nonprofit. It costs us about twice as much to serve visitors as we charge. We want to remain affordable for everyone to enjoy the benefits of hands-on science education.

Science literacy is important. Our kids must grow up knowing how to solve problems with the environment, energy, technology, etc., McWane supports families and teachers in our mission “to change lives through science and wonder.”

True joy is watching another delight in something. Knowing a person is learning skills and that we are igniting a lifelong love of learning is icing on the cake. By donating to McWane Science Center, you can experience the joy of being a part of something really big - you can provide joy for thousands of kids.

From outside my office, I can hear hundreds of kids excited as they get off of school buses. In the lobby, I hear kids crying that they don’t want to leave. It’s in those moments that I know what we are doing is working. Kids love experiential learning. AND THEY NEED IT if there’s to be hope for our future.

We need your financial support more than ever. If you don’t have a membership, buy one. Tell others what a great value memberships to McWane are - give them as gifts. A donation of any size - $25 to thousands of dollars - will help our community. You can provide hope for the future. And when you do that, you can experience great joy.

l’ll step off of my soap box now.

Contributor Profile:
Linda H. Baker is the vice president of development and marketing for McWane Science Center and mother of three boys. After a tour in corporate communications and print media, she found her purpose for existing: to help people find true joy.

Birds of a Feather - Part 2

by James Lamb, Paleontologist
















There are to date at least 21 different types of dinosaurs that are known to have had feathers. Even Velociraptor, a well-established dinosaur, appears to have had a feather coating, as a recently discovered specimen shows that it had the bumps on one of its forearm bones called “quill nodes” that indicate where feathers attach in modern birds. In fact, it appears very likely that all carnivorous dinosaurs (the group called theropod dinosaurs) had feathers, at least as juveniles. It also seems that the dromaeosaurs, the specific group of theropods that Deinonychus belongs to, are the closest relatives to birds. Many of the feathered dinosaur skeletons have the switchblade claw on their hind feet. Recently, there have been discoveries such as the “bristles” on the back on the small Triceratops relative Psittacosaurus, and just two months ago of what appear to be feathers on the heterodontosaurid dinosaur Tianyulong, that indicate that perhaps all dinosaurs had feathers, at least originally (although they may have been lost later by such groups as the hadrosaurs (duck-bills) which we know from skin impressions did not have feathers). This is because Psittacosaurus and Tianyulong are plant-eating dinosaurs that are not close relatives to theropods, and in particular heterodontosaurids are near the base of the dinosaur family tree.

So what did a dinosaur need with feathers?

The key question about the origins of flight in birds if dinosaurs are indeed their ancestors, is how did ground-dwelling animals become flying animals? Looking at the range of feather types in modern birds, Dr. Alan Brush has worked out the probable sequence of the evolution of feathers from a reptilian type scale. The problem is that the intermediate stages in feather evolution, say, halfway between a scale and a feather, are not capable of sustaining flight. That means that feathers were originally evolved for a purpose other than flight, a purpose for which intermediate grade feathers provided some useful function. It appears that the answer to this riddle is that feathers originally were for insulation. We now know from a variety of evidence that dinosaurs almost certainly had some form of warm-blooded metabolism, and the earliest dinosaurs were all small animals. Small warm-blooded animals lose body heat more rapidly than a large animal with the same metabolism. To prevent the loss of body heat, small warm-blooded animals need insulation. Dinosaurs had feathers for the same reason that mammals have hair – to stay warm. Indeed, birds and mammals are the only warm-blooded animals. Mammals inherited fur from their ancestors, birds inherited feathers from their ancestors. The intermediate stage of a feather may not work for flight, but it does work as insulation, at least better than a scale. Only later were they co-opted for use in flight. For many years though there hasn’t been a satisfying explanation for how theropod dinosaurs made the transition into the air. The final piece came a few years ago with the work of Dr. Ken Dial, and is known as WAIR, or wing-assisted-incline-running. I’ll give an example from personal experience how this works.

Some years back, while searching for dinosaurs, umm, fossil ones, in central Alabama, I was walking through a stretch of woods to get to a site, when I scared up a wild turkey in the underbrush. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised; turkeys generally rely on camouflage, and will hide quietly in a bush and let you walk right past them. Evidently, this one decided at the last instant the camouflage wasn’t working because the turkey exploded out of a bush within arms reach in a cloud of leaves and feathers and with a noise equivalent to what I thought of at the time as a charging rhino crashing through the underbrush. The turkey sprinted across the clearing, heading towards a large cedar tree. And then it did the oddest thing – it waited until it was right at the tree and then flew vertically up it, it’s chest just inches away from the trunk. Heart pounding, still checking to see if my pants were still dry recovering from the initial surprise, the whole thing having taken less than 2 seconds, I began to wonder why it had waited until the last instant to fly up the tree instead of taking off and flying in a shallower trajectory into the tree. What WAIR proves is that in fact the turkey did not fly into the tree at all, it RAN into the tree – vertically up the trunk.

Dial has spent many hours filming birds running up the trunks of trees. He has shown that a bird can run up a tree quicker from a short distance than it can fly into the tree. In fact, this happens so quickly that it can only be seen in high-speed video footage, which is why the turkey appeared to me to have flown up the tree. Further, birds only a day or two old exhibit this behavior, and also sometimes run up inclined surfaces and use it as a launching point to glide away from danger long before their wings are developed enough for flight. He has documented that birds can run up completely vertical surfaces in this manner, flapping the wings both as a propulsive assist and to help keep the feet pressed against the tree. It also turns out that they move their arms/wings in exactly the same manner that they do during active flight. This is almost certainly the origin of flight in dinosaurs – small dinosaurs with feathers evolved for insulation modifying a predator-escape behavior for a new purpose.

Next week: Birds of a Feather Part 3

Contributor Profile:
James Lamb is a native Birminghamster with a nearly life-long interest in fossils. He collected his first fossil when he was 5 years old. Friends and family members assure him he has not matured much since then. James is curator of paleontology at McWane Science Center, and would like to one day see the absolute treasure trove of Alabama's fossil heritage revealed to the public. When not at work he wishes he were in the field digging up fossils. At home he enjoys reading, jogging, woodworking, and carving. He has been informed that he is in the habit of telling atrocious puns, but this comes as a surprise to him. James describes himself as a "science nerd".

Birds of a Feather - Part 1

by James Lamb, Paleontologist

The pair of fighting dinosaurs tumbled across the sidewalk in front of me, bringing me to an abrupt halt. Screeching, flipping tail over talon, grasping at each other with their sharp, three-toed hind feet and stabbing at each other with their mouths, they didn’t even pause when they rolled over a vertical drop twice their own body length. Finally they separated, each lying on its back, and continued to screech ferociously at one another. It was just in time too, as the drop off the curb had brought them perilously close to the street. Well, at least I didn’t have to jump in and break them up before they got in traffic. Then, as the two White-throated sparrows flew off to nurse their wounds in relative safety, I couldn’t help but think how glad I was that these little feathered dinosaurs were so tiny compared to their now extinct cousins. Imagine if they were the size of Deinonychus, the villains of Jurassic Park (incorrectly called Velociraptor in the movie) - no one would ever go outside.

At this point you are perhaps wondering if you read the previous paragraph correctly. Did I really mean that birds are little feathered dinosaurs? Well, yes. As amazing as it seems, birds are essentially the only group of dinosaurs to survive the global catastrophe 65 million years ago when something like 65% of all life on Earth became extinct. Dinosaurs had been the most successful terrestrial vertebrates ever; a group that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for 150 million years. And, except for birds, they’re all gone. But – dinosaurs? Really? Let me start the story at the beginning, always a good place to start.

The oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, lived about 145-150 million years ago. The first specimen was discovered in 1861 and right from the beginning stirred controversy because of its mixture of avian (bird-like) features such as feathers, and more “reptile-like” features such as teeth and clawed, three-fingered hands. There were scientists even then who thought that the best match for bird ancestors were the dinosaurs. At the time though, there was only the one Archaeopteryx specimen and no particularly good match amongst dinosaurs for many features of the skeleton then known only in birds. The ancestry of birds remained in a sort of limbo for the next 100 years, with various groups of reptiles favored by different paleontologists. All that changed in 1969 with the publication of the formal description of Deinonychus. Deinonychus broke the mold of the old stereotype that dinosaurs were slow, lumbering, dim-witted animals with “extinction” stamped on their bony foreheads. Not only does the skeleton imply speed and grace, they had a sickle-shaped claw on the second toe of each hind foot that could be rotated through 180 degrees. The claw was held off the ground when running and then rotated into slashing/killing position once the prey had been captured. One of my college professors used to refer to Deinonychus and its kin as “Bobcats with a switchblade on each foot”. Perhaps equally as interesting were the skeletal similarities to birds.

One of the things that is unique about birds is the special arrangement of bones in the wrist that allows them to fold their hand, that is, the wing, which is mostly formed from an elongated hand, up against their body, and rotate the hand/wing properly to achieve the flight stroke. Deinonychus had this same feature. Deinonychus also possessed what until then was a uniquely bird characteristic called the “triosseal canal”, a trough formed by three bones in the shoulder region that allows the flight muscles that attach to the sternum, the breastbone, to loop over the shoulder like a pulley and power the recovery stroke of the wing during flight. Deinonychus appears to have evolved these features to use its long and mobile arms in capturing prey. Finding these features in Deinonychus started a flurry of renewed interest in the dinosaur/bird connection, and over the next couple of decades, as new dinosaur discoveries were made, and more Archaeopteryx and other early birds were found, paleontologists documented over 100 skeletal features shared uniquely in the animal world by only dinosaurs and birds.

Then came the fossils from dinosaur-aged lake deposits in China. The chances of any particular organism being preserved in the rock record are not good. The main reason for this is that most animals don’t die in an environment where they will be quickly covered up by rock-forming sediments such as sand or clay. The ancient freshwater lake deposits in China are an exception. Animals were buried quickly in fine-grained sediment that not only preserved the skeleton in near life position, but also so effectively sealed the fossil from the air that traces of soft tissue are often preserved. Many of the fossils coming from these deposits are of feathered dinosaurs. That is, traces of feathers, in some cases surrounding the skeleton in a sort of halo are preserved as a carbonaceous film. Not only did scanning electron microscope images show that these have the highly distinctive structure of modern bird feathers, they also have the same chemical signature as feathers. Feathers are made from a tough structural protein called keratin. Hair, fingernails and claws are other examples of biological structures made from keratin. However in the animal world only feathers are made solely of a single type of keratin, called beta-keratin.

Next week: Birds of a Feather Part 2

Contributor Profile:

James Lamb is a native Birminghamster with a nearly life-long interest in fossils. He collected his first fossil when he was 5 years old. Friends and family members assure him he has not matured much since then. James is curator of paleontology at McWane Science Center, and would like to one day see the absolute treasure trove of Alabama's fossil heritage revealed to the public. When not at work he wishes he were in the field digging up fossils. At home he enjoys reading, jogging, woodworking, and carving. He has been informed that he is in the habit of telling atrocious puns, but this comes as a surprise to him. James describes himself as a "science nerd".

Summer Camps are in full swing at McWane!

By Dana Crisson, Educator

“It’s HOT.” “I’m BORED.” “What can I do today?”

Do those phrases sound familiar? Not here. The halls at the McWane Science Center are filled with excited day campers this summer. Here, the budding scientist can travel into outer space, explore a bug’s world, discuss the origins of mythical creatures, dive into marine biology, or pretend to be prefects like Harry Potter at Hogwarts or padawans in the Star Wars universe. Over fifty different camp themes allow children to experience something new each day. When you are having this much fun, it is impossible to be bored.

These camps are just as entertaining for those of us who work here as they are for the children who attend them. We have been planning and plotting for weeks, decorating classrooms (“Can you help me hang the ‘brick’ curtain for the secret entrance to Platform 9 ¾ for Hogwarts camp?”), collecting props and costumes (“Have you seen my Darth Vader mask?”), and hoarding supplies (“Who moved my stash of shoe boxes for my dioramas for Weird Wacky Science?”)

In Crazy Cool Chemistry camp we made copper pennies shiny again and we concocted bright green slime. We filled jars with heavy cream and shook the jars as we danced to music until the cream magically turned into butter, and the next day we explored the properties of yeast and the children ate their butter on fresh baked bread. “We are going to make butter like this at home,” said one excited student. “I’m going to tell my mother never to buy butter again.” The last day we feasted on delicious liquid nitrogen ice cream. “I LIKE science,” said one happy camper with an ice cream mustache.

Throughout McWane Science Center, other educators are helping their students have hands-on fun, too. To borrow a phrase from Art Linkletter, some of our camping kids say the darnedest things. The children at Science and Music camp were studying musical instruments all week and on Friday they were asked to bring in instruments to play for the class, so one child brought a guitar and one brought bells. Another child didn’t bring an instrument, but brought a bowl and spoon. As she flipped the bowl over and began to play her homemade drum, the educator asked the other campers what kind of instrument the child was playing. After a moment of thoughtful silence, another camper said, “I don’t know, but it looks like a chicken casserole to me!” The Star Wars campers had food on the brain last week as well. Throughout the week, the kids studied the science behind making the Star Wars movies. They were divided into groups where they actually wrote scripts and made props for their very own Star Wars movie, which was acted out, filmed and then screened in our Rushton Theater on the first floor. The group named the Starbucks scripted a scene involving frappuccino. The Mental Ewoks wrote a script called “The Last Sandwich of Darth Vader,” and the script from the TonTons of Hoth group had Darth Vader repeatedly calling for hot chocolate. (Hmmm, I’m sensing a theme here….) And lastly, overheard at craft time in Rock On Camp: “These are baby scissors—and I’m SEVEN!”

So, as the temperatures continue to soar into the upper 90s and the allure of the neighborhood pool begins to wear thin, think about reserving a space for your child to attend one of our camps. Today at lunch I watched a group of first graders from the Science of Superheroes camp shouting excitedly as they dashed about on the front plaza wearing yellow fabric capes. Several camps in July and the first week in August are still open; campers can explore the ocean floor in Under the Sea, dig paleontology in Dino Discoveries, discover kitchen chemistry in Science Attack on Food, along with a number of other unique camp themes.

McWane summer camps make learning an unforgettable adventure that kids will never forget. At the “world premiere” of the newest Star Wars DVD from last week’s Star Wars camp, one child exclaimed as she was watching the campers on the screen re-enacting very own battle scene with light sabers and blasters, “This is wicked awesome!”

Contributor Profile:
Dana Crisson, her husband, Dwight, are huge fans of both the Harry Potter and Star Wars series. Their daughters, Rachel, 20, and Christina, 17, are also huge fans and regret that they are too old to attend any of the camps at McWane this summer, but unfortunately their parents made them get paying jobs instead.