This last Saturday, Scottsdale Community College held an open house that it called: Artie-Palooza!
It was a time to showcase the school to the community. I was asked by my division if I could help and I decided that I would. I offered to do rocket launches and water balloon launching. I was told that the school was excited that I was doing these things.
Before the event I asked a student, Nikki, if she wanted to help me out. She is one of the amazing ladies I had in 3 past classes and is currently still around. She said she would love to help and got the other two young ladies from those classes to agree as well (Haelee and Debbie).
Not much to do after that until the day came. Which it finally did 2 days ago.
I got there early to fill up water balloons, and that was a joy. I spend 40 minutes fill balloons, and getting myself and the classroom wet. But it was done and then I headed out to where I was supposed to be launching the balloons. I spotted Haelee and Nikki and they helped me get things set up. I was sad to hear that Debbie wasn’t feeling well so she wasn’t going to make it.
So the event started and truthfully there weren’t that many people that I saw. I was off from where the main event was because I didn’t want to get anyone hit by a stray water balloon or have a rocket land on a building (or person). But We did have some families show up aver the 45 minutes that I was doing water balloon launching. Haelee and Nikki did a great job getting people to come over and do it. They had the opportunity to shot balloons at me, and the younger kids couldn’t resist trying. The launcher I got from a student group wasn’t the best one, but it was a gift and that made it worth it. I got hit a few times, and there were a lot I ran after to try and catch (which I did catch a few). A few of my current students showed up too to say hello. That was unexpected (they were working on their celebration of knowledge from my class and they was why they were on campus). We have about 4-5 families show up and launch balloons (not counting my own).
After water balloon launching it was time to setup for rocket launching. I decided to do this in a back parking lot so there was no chance of a car getting hit or a rocket landing on a building. It did mean there were less people coming to it as well. I think we had 3 families show up for that part. It was really cool. The other full time phsyics teacher at SCC brought her son down and he is into rockets so he brought a couple big ones to launch off. He even let my daughter launch one. That one ended up in a tree which was a good thing because the parachute didn’t deploy correctly and the tree saved the rocket. It took us 30 minutes to get it out of the tree, but at least the rocket wasn’t badly damaged.
There was a lot of other things going on that I didn’t get to see but my family reported on: lots of food, face painting, cyanotype bandanas, mask making, Artie was there (hence the picture at the top), pie with the math department, a scavenger hunt for STEM, and lots of tables with information and small giveaways. I heard that there were a couple hundred people overall. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is better than last time I guess (someone told me only 20 people showed up for the last one of these open houses).
I couldn’t have done it as well without the help of Haelee and Nikki. Thank you ladies!
Then, once the event was over the art department was having their iron pour. This is where the students in the sculpture classes get to have their iron poured for it. It is quite the event. I really talked it up. There were a number of spectators. My family did scratch blocks for it as well. That is where you take compressed sand blocks and stratch something into them (like a picture or words or something). Then at the event they use the “extra” iron when they are toward the end of a crucible of iron to then fill those in with and you get it later. I would assume I will get ours later this week or next week sometime.
Overall I had fun. There are some things I learned and some thing I think I need to pass on. I need to do the water balloon launching where everyone else was. I wasn’t noticed that much since I was too far off the beaten path. I won’t move the rockets, but then I could let people know about it and hopefully get more people to show up. I think that SCC needs to target the local junior high schools. I think if we could get families from that group to come and see what SCC has to offer that it may spark thought a few years later and we could possibly get some of those kids to attend SCC. I loved having former students there, and I will ask them (if not others) to help out in the future as well.