Sponsored by the non-profit educational and service organization, The Society of Women Engineers Southeast Florida Section, the intent is to increase the students’ as well as their parents’, teachers’, and counselors’ knowledge of engineering and other technical fields.
The EF2D event involves sponsored booths. Each sponsor presents a hands on engineering related activity by which the students, parents, and engineers can interact with each other. For example, the Bottle Rocket booth teaches students aerospace engineering and the Making Polymers booth involves chemistry. Last year, Seminole Ridge SECME students challenged children to learn the physics of projectiles by making a popfly launcher with paint stirrers, a PVC pipe coupler and a ping pong ball. The minicatapults were sponsored in part by Lowe's Home Improvement of Royal Palm Beach, store #0654.
This year, Seminole SECME will make magnetic field maps of Mars. Then the participants make "field detectors" from simple objects to predict the locations of the fields. The big idea of this demonstration is that the Sun and planets have different magnetic properties. Sunspots are related to magnetism on the sun. Earth has a strong simple magnetic field with two poles. But Mars has no magnetosphere!
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/listbytype/Solar_System_Magnetism.html
http://mgs-mager.gsfc.nasa.gov/kids/magfield.html
(Click on the first picture to flip through a photostream of 2011 EF2D)
