2013 Home Run Science Challenge

The San Diego Festival of Science & Engineering’s Home Run Science Challenge, presented by the UC San Diego Department of Bioengineering, is an EXPO DAY activity which challenges students to “run the bases” by learning key science concepts at special EXPO DAY exhibits. To complete the challenge activity and receive a prize, students must visit five featured exhibits and verbally answer a question on the science or engineering content to receive a stamp on their worksheet. Students will retain their completed challenge worksheet to bring into class and validate their participation, making this an excellent opportunity for an assignment or extra credit. This activity has an expected target audience of grades 4-8, but is adaptable for all-ages participation.

Home Run Science Challenge Worksheet

Download the worksheet which includes detailed instructions on completing the challenge. Please consider printing out this worksheet to bring to EXPO DAY.

Download the 2013 Home Run Science Challenge Handout

K-12 Classroom Partnerships with UC San Diego

We encourage K-12 educators to explore classroom partnership opportunities with UC San Diego students and scientists/engineers. Example activities include having a UC San Diego graduate student give a special topic workshop, serve as a classroom science advisor or judge for a school science fair.
Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information regarding classroom partnerships.

2012 Home Run Science Challenge Featured Exhibits

UC San Diego Bioengineering presents:
“From the Bottle to the Body: Making the Medicines that Make You Well”

Visitors to our exhibit can build their very own drug delivery vehicle to help a medicine get to its correct location in the body. They’ll also help a medicine make its way through the GI tract and to its destination. Demos will show water fleas, which are see-through, responding to some common drugs, including increasing their heart rate. Our exhibit will also feature colorful displays on common medicines and where they act.

Key Science and Engineering Concepts:
When scientists and engineers are making a medicine, there are many things to think about. Not only does the medicine have to fix the illness (act on the correct molecules), it also has to be able to get to the right place in the body. A special way to get medicine to the right place is through drug delivery vehicles. These help protect the medicine as it travels through the GI tract, blood, or other system to reach the target.

UC San Diego Biomedical Engineering Society presents:
“Engineering the Body”

At the BMES booth, students will get the chance to try out a demo pump made of plastic bottles that represents the heart. They’ll also get up close and personal with plaque build-up in arteries when they view the see-through vinyl “arteries” with various degrees of plaque build-up that show the difference between healthy arteries and arteries with high cholestrol. They’ll learn how the flow of blood is altered due to the plaque buildup.

Key Science and Engineering Concepts:
The cardiovascular system is a critical organ system for body function, and it includes many different components. These include blood, which is composed of many different components, including red blood cells and leucocytes. The heart is a strong, muscular organ that pumps blood through the body following the pathway of blood flow. Blood flow can be affected by cholestrol and fat build-up due to unbalanced nutritional intake.

Kaiser

Visitors will get to see live echocardiograms performed, and might even get to have one done on them! They will learn about how high frequency sound waves can be used to detect objects in many different contexts. Examples will include ways that sound is used to “see” in the animal kingdom as well as how sound can be used for medical diagnostics.

Key Science and Engineering Concepts:
Echolocation is used by some animals to detect their surrounding, including information about the size, shape, features, and movement of other animals and objects around them. Animals that used echolocation include bats, whales, and dolphins. The Doppler Effect explains why sounds appear different when they are coming toward or moving away from the listener. High frequency sounds waves can be used in medical diagnostics to “look” at tissue, such as in an echocardiogram or ultrasound.

Qualcomm 

The Qualcomm booth will teach visitors about many new technologies that have been recently introduced or are in the making. Computer vision demos will educate participants on new ways to interact with smart phones and other devices, including contactless gesture recognition. You can learn about phones of the future that may even be able to tell what you want just based on where your hands, legs, and fingers are! A new cell phone technology with much higher efficiency and improved voice quality will be highlighted, along with a completely wireless phone that doesn’t even need to plug in to charge.

Key Science and Engineering Concepts:

Lots of engineering goes into making the smart phones and other devices we use every day. Smart phones appear to respond in “real time” due to a processing frame rate of 30 frames per second. Computer vision, which is appearing on mobile devices, is made possible by the device’s camera, central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU). Along with motion and vision sensors, many devices can also respond to contact and some even use devices called accelerometers to know when they’re accelerating, or changing their speed or direction of movement. These features are difficult to produce and run, however, because they cause increased wear and tear on devices, require very high power, and are computationally expensive. One new way to provide the power phones need is through loose inductive coupling, which allows phones to charge when they’re near the charger rather than plugged in to a specific location.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory “Journey from the Earth to the Planets and Beyond”

Blast off with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as you learn about NASA’s many exciting voyages. These include the missions to Mars; Messenger, which is exploring Mercury; New Horizons, which is headed to Pluto; and Dawn, a journey to explore the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Visitors to the booth will see demos on these missions and learn about what makes up the universe. They’ll also get to hear about Kepler, NASA’s search for another earth-like planet! Could there be other life out there?

Key Science and Engineering Concepts:
The patterns of stars in the sky, which can be seen by telescopes, stay the same, although they appear to move across the sky nightly, and different stars can be seen in different seasons. The sun is a medium-sized star located near the edge of a disc-shaped galaxy of stars, part of which can be seen as a glowing band of light that spans the sky on a very clear night. The universe contains many billions of galaxies, and each galaxy contains many billions of stars. To the naked eye, even the closest of these galaxies is no more than a dim, fuzzy spot. The earth, which is made mostly of rock and covered primarily by water, pulls things on or near the surface toward it by its gravity. Earth is the only body in the solar system that appears able to support life. This information, as well as other important contributions to the advancement of science, mathematics, and technology, have been made by different kinds of people, in different cultures, at different times.

Reuben H. Fleet Science Center 

At the "Fleet Science Zone," visitors age 6 and older are invited to explore the concept of persistence of vision while creating their own optical illusions.  Visitors will also have the opportunity to harness the power of the vortex generators, and explore the effects that air can have on the objects nearby.

Key Science and Engineering Concepts:
Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina. An afterimage is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased.  A vortex is a spinning column of air or water. The spin causes the vortex to appear and keeps it stable once it has. Although these vortex generators feel like they are pushing a ball of air, it is actually a doughnut-shaped vortex. A vortex generator works because when the air is forced out the front of the generator, some air hits the edges of the hole and slows down. This slower air is then pulled forward by the faster moving air in the center and starts swirling around itself in a ring. This spinning ring can travel great distances because the spin, like a frisbee's spin, keeps it nice and stable.