Workshops

Learn to extract plant DNA and the types of analyses that can be done with these. Learn about plant diseases and their causative agents. Observe diseased samples and the infecting microbes.

Target Age Group: 6^th – 12^th grade

Have you ever wondered about the engineering principles that are required when building the most amazing structures on Earth? In this fun filled workshop you will get to put your creative building abilities to the test when you build a structure out of marshmallows and spaghetti and see how it stands up to gravity and natural disasters, like an earthquake!

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Using the Landfill Enviroscape for a hands-on experience, girls learn where our garbage goes and about the very costly and sophisticated methods now used in disposing of our waste. Developing this concept leads to a discussion of why, how and what we recycle in Kentucky, and how our mindset can change so that we respect our environment and create less waste by designing new products that will never enter the landfill-bound waste stream. Ideas for Recycled Art Projects will be provided.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 7^th grade

Students learn how engineers construct buildings to withstand damage from earthquakes by building their own structures with straws and tape. Students test how earthquake-proof their buildings are by testing them on an earthquake simulated in a pan of Jell-O®.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Learn how the different sizes of popsicle sticks made into catapult can send various weights different distances across the room or table.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 8^th grade

Explore the concepts of being a maker! Who can be a maker? What do you need to make? Dive into hand-on maker activities to answer these questions.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 6^th grade

Did you know that cosmetics companies employ teams of specialized chemists to develop and test each new line of makeup, perfume, lotion, or soap? This workshop lets you be the cosmetics chemist. You will learn which liquids to use in a solution to make your own lip gloss to take home. Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Learn how Art and Math are connected. Use tessellations and a compass to make flowers and make name tangrams. You won’t want to miss how math can make your world beautiful! You will walk away with an art project that you created with math!

Target Age Group: 6^th – 8^th grade

Neurons are the basis behind all communication between the outside world and your super smart brain. In this workshop you will be able to build your own unique neuron and learn how neurons communicate with each other using your hand-made model!

Target Age Group: 4^th – 8^th grade

Become an epidemiologist at the CDC for a day and solve the case of a mysterious outbreak. You and your team will study microbes, bacteria, and the habits of everyday people in order to determine what disease has been wreaking havoc. Use your lab equipment and field notes to save the lives of innocent people with science!

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Come discover what makes each of us unique from the inside out! Students will explore DNA and learn parts of the molecule and how they work together. Then the fun continues when students use LEGO® Bricks to represent the components of the molecule and build the DNA double helix structure. Come unwind with us and build your DNA out of bricks!

Target Age Group: 6^th – 8^th grade

Food has the power to fight disease. Join UK’s Nutritional Sciences and Pharmacology Students Association as we investigate the magical properties of a variety of foods.

Target Age Group: 5^th – 8^th grade

In this workshop girls will learn how civil engineers design skyscrapers to withstand different loadings (e.g. static, wind, snow, earthquake, etc.). Then they will work in teams to design, build and test their own tall structures.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Girls will learn about energy conversion. They will build their own electric motor from scratch using only a battery, wire, and a magnet. They will also assemble a dynamo torch, which converts the energy from the rotation of your hand to electricity, and then light.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 7^th grade

Everyone gets to become a structural engineer during this session. Using limited amounts of material (marshmallows and spaghetti), each team of engineers will build a bridge. Each bridge will be tested for strength. So will your bridge fall down?

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Girls will make a bracelet or keychain to take home out of solar beads. These beads change color when exposed to UV radiation. Girls learn about the electromagnetic spectrum and how it is used in engineering applications.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 6^th grade

Water is all around us, but we mostly ignore it. We’ll explore how drinking water is stored in the ground, using rocks from various parts of Kentucky. We’ll also model the flow of a river (using water and sand), and plan a community along its banks. We’ll put our community in place and see what happens during normal conditions and during flood conditions. If we choose out location poorly, our community will soon be washed away! We’ll gain a new appreciation for how much of our lives are impacted by something as seemingly simple as the flow of water.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Want to learn how to become a coding pro but don’t know where to start? No prior experience is necessary in this workshop! Girls will be using Let’s Start Coding kits to learn more about computer programming with real, typed code. Girls will start at the very beginning to learn basic coding syntax that can be used in every programming language. By the end of the workshop girls will complete an online lesson and create their very own light show!

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Explore the mechanics of flight by comparing bird wing specimens and aircraft wings! You will get to learn how anatomy and math come together to determine how a bird (or plane) will fly. By measuring and calculating different wing features you will develop hypotheses about that wing’s flight characteristics. We will introduce you to some fundamental principles of both biology and engineering with this hands on interactive activity!

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

The girls will hypothesize which fruit has the most Vitamin C and we will then test their hypothesis by measuring it using an iodine titration. The girls will be divided into 3 groups (one instructor per group) and each girl will do one trial so we can look at the average from their group. Once all are done, we then combine all the groups data and rank the fruits in order of highest to lowest Vitamin C and see if it supported their hypothesis or not.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 8^th grade

In this workshop, you will learn about the engineering adventures of the first flight and how aviation has transformed through recent decades. You will also investigate different parts of an airplane and compare them to those of a simple glider. You will be able to assemble your own glider, observe how the slightest modifications affect its flight path, and race it against other participants.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Every hour enough solar energy reaches the earth to meet the energy demands of the entire world for one year. Capturing this energy with inexpensive and efficient solar cells is the challenge. In this laboratory we will learn how traditional solar cells are made, we’ll test these solar cells and use them to power light emitting diodes, and we will make our own solar cells using the dye molecules in blackberries.

Target Age Group: 6^th – 12^th grade

Food engineering is a field where engineering principles are applied to the conversion of agricultural products to nutritious, safe and stable food items. Food engineers work places like PepsiCo, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Kraft, Hershey, to mention a few. Food engineering takes cooking, baking, and preparing food to the extreme: 1) creating new and exciting foods, 2) making sure our food is nutritious and safe, 3) and helping to feed the ever growing population. In this workshop we’ll talk about some of the ways food engineering keep our food safe and some of the interesting way they make food taste so good.

Target Age Group: 6^th – 12^th grade

In this workshop students will learn about the importance of communication between our brains and our muscles. We will discuss the areas of the brain that control movement, the neuromuscular junction, and the muscular response. In the last half of the workshop, students will work together in a hands-on competition to create the best functioning neuromuscular junction!

Target Age Group: 6^th – 12^th grade

Over the last few years, members of a small community have developed systems related to chronic arsenic poisoning from drinking contaminated well water. As the town’s hydrologist, your task is to identify the source of the arsenic. With this Project WET activity, girls learn how to analyze data to trace to flow of contaminants in groundwater.

Target Age Group: 6^th – 12^th grade

A series of experiments to understand the mechanisms that generate our atmosphere and how that affects the weather.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 8^th grade

On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! Start with a black of pine, add wheels, a customized cardboard body and you’ve got a pinewood derby car ready to race! In this fast paced venture into gravity powered vehicles, girls will use a drill press, band saw, hot glue guns and hand tools to create 7 inch long, self-propelled cars that race down a 24 foot long inclined track. They will be able to design the look and shape of their car as well as test and tweak it on the track. When the cars are finished, the girls will pair off and race, 2 at a time in an elimination-style competition. Racers will learn about potential and kinetic energy as well as aesthetic design as they try to build the fastest car in the class.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 8^th grade

Somebody call the doctor… the tree doctor! Trees are beautiful and important for our environment. But did you know that they get sick just like we do? In this session you will learn about the diseases and insects that hurt trees and solve the mystery of what is killing them!

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

Kids will learn what smart grid is, available generation resources, and how renewable energy is integrated into power grid. Kids will build some power system models using computer software package and perform simulations to observe voltage, current and power quantities and understand how power system is operated and what future challenges are.

Target Age Group: 6^th – 12^th grade

If a cell contains meters of DNA, then how does it all fit inside a tiny nucleus? In this interactive workshop, students will extract DNA from strawberries using common household supplies to learn how DNA is carefully packaged inside the cell.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 8^th grade

Create a felt bracelet cuff that lights up. You will use conductive thread to sew an electronic circuit with LEDs in a bracelet.

Target Age Group: 4^th – 12^th grade

We all need food to grow and thrive, but how does this food become our fuel? Enzymes perform a chemical reaction acting like scissors to break down food into sugar. Our bodies produce a unique set of enzymes to perform this digestive task. Girls will learn about how enzymes such as amylase and lactase help us digest food. We will do experiments to understand how amylase breaks down starch in bread, how enzymes can help people who are lactose intolerant digest milk, and how the structure of proteins makes this all possible!

Target Age Group: 9^th – 12^th grade

Chemistry can be fun and beautiful. In this hands-on workshop, students will test different items for pH and learn about buffers, chemical structures, and the visible light spectrum. Anthocyanin, a natural pigment found in a variety of fruits and vegetables, is a unique compound because it undergoes structural color changes under different pH conditions. Red cabbage juice, rich in anthocyanin, will be used in this workshop to measure the pH of different household solutions. Let’s explore chemistry with color.

Target Age Group: 6^th – 8^th grade

This 90 minute workshop will focus on the Lego EV3 Mindstorm Robot. The first half of this workshop will acquaint the attendees with the basic concepts of Robotics and the capabilities of the EV3 Robot. Next, participants will be asked to build a Robot to specification. The second half of the workshop will focus on programming the EV3 Robot. Simple tasks will first be assigned culminating with challenges from a past FIRST Lego League robot competition.

Target Age Group: 6^th – 12^th grade

Note: This workshop is jointly conducted by Dr. Bruce L. Walcott and student leaders from the engineering honor society at UK: Tau Beta Pi. This team has hosted an FIRST Lego League robotic competition for 15 straight years and has held similar workshops for over 20 years.

A crime has been committed and the only evidence that is left is smeared muddy footprints! Size or sole pattern cannot be determined. Students will use mathematics to select the likely suspect from a lineup to help catch the criminal!

Target Age Group: 6^th – 8^th grade