What is inside the marshmallows?
Today I had an opportunity to do a school visit with the Scientists and Innovators in the School organization. I volunteer there and try to visit about ten different classrooms every year in order to engage kids with science. I especially try to visit schools in which the children might have fewer opportunities to visit The Science World or other museums. Today, I visited a few special education classrooms in our local Vancouver school. The teachers explained to me the challenges of teaching these kids and warned me that the kids might not be very engaged. I decided to try anyways. I can only say how happy I was to see how engaged they were. One thing especially touched me. I had lots of experiments with me. At one point, I was explaining to them an experiment with marshmallows as shown in our video. When we discussed the experiment, I asked them – what is inside the marshmallows? I expected the answers, such as air, sugar, etc. Instead, one of the girls who was watching the experiment very carefully responded – yamminess… and then they proceeded to explain why the marshmallows got bigger when we pumped the air out. So it was a lot of humour, laughs and joy. This was so-so cute and touching. I am glad I was able to reach out to these kids and I really appreciate their amazing teachers.