Every year, going back to 2003 I believe, the Oklahoma State University Alumni Association hosts an event where alumni grandparents along with their grandkids come to campus and do fun learning activities together. This year, I was the keynote speaker for the event!
So, one of the side-effects of being a new assistant professor is that you tend to volunteer for things that sound fun, this whether you truly have the time to do them. Our department chair received a request that a chemist give the opening session lecture for this event, and naturally I raised my hand. Thus began my participation in Grandparent University 2014.
When people normally think of chemists, pictures of explosions, bubbling liquids, and billowing clouds of smoke come to mind. When agreeing to act as host, I explicitly stated that I would do nothing of the sort. Instead, I wanted do something educational in a different way. This is a surprisingly challenging task when your audience consists of 500+ grandparents, age 60+, and their grandkids/legacies, age 7-13. Bimodal distribution indeed. That and I've been most recently teaching graduate students. So, the idea was to give them a tour of scale and an appreciation for the size of a molecule.
So how big is a molecule? I tried to take them through the history of looking at tiny things. This involved me introducing the superpower of near-sightedness, hence the Nearsight Man and Closeup Girl superheroes on the above image that I created. We then had a macro photography demo where we saw how far we could look up Darth Vader's nose and a Scanning Electron Microscopy sequence where we tunneled into the depths of the surface of sheet of paper.
Overall, it was a fun experience where I got to try a lot of new presentation things I wouldn't normally do at, say, a scientific meeting. The feedback I recieved from grandparents was actually quite positive! Anything better than "average" is a win in such a situation. If I were to do it again, maybe I would force the kids to do dynamic activities. As it stands, I felt like I presented at too high a level for the youngest of the legacies. They asked a ton of great questions though, many more questions than I get when I chemical thermodynamics.
Pulling something like this off required a bit of help, and thanks go out to Bill Henley in Botany for some images and the loaner disecting microscope (which I unfortunately didn't use in the lecture), and Terry Colberg at the OSU Microscopy Facility for the series of SEM images that tunneled into paper. Also, many thanks to Melisa Parkerson, Melissa Mourer, Chase Carter, and the other organizers of Grandparent University. Maybe I'll participate again next year, though this will likely be by developing one of the smaller-group majors, possibly in molecular world building....