by Huw James
Robert L. Crippen Elementary School (New Caney ISD) Career Day was held on March 28, 2023, from 8:30 am to 11:30 am. The school is named after a former astronaut.
The career day schedule was organized as three separate classroom presentations with the presenter moving from one room to the next. The first was to about 30 second-grade students, the second was to about 30 fifth-grade students and the third to about 60 fifth-grade students. This is quite different from our typical Outreach event format.
A PowerPoint presentation for Geoscience was used followed by our typical presentations for Compressional and Transverse sound waves using our Colorful Spiral. The students held their throats and then grunted hard to feel the sound waves in unison, this was very popular. Then the students put their ears on and off their disks to hear elastic waves which silenced when they moved their heads off the desk.
We discussed looking for minerals with gold, silver, and diamonds being popular. One student asked how to find diamonds so we discussed kimberlite pipes.
They looked at and felt our rock samples including our large rock salt specimen and some sheetrock. Obsidian was well known due to the Minecraft video game. We saw the color, translucency, and crystal structure of the salt. We referred to a salt dome in the presentation and discussed salt domes in nearby Humble and Beaumont, Texas.
We gave away 101 GSH spiral toys. The students were very well-behaved and fully engaged. I learned a few lessons from the classroom style format.