From July 8-10 the members of the University of Latvia Young Minds Section participated in a sports, music and creativity festival named “Playground”. The festival proved to be quite popular, garnering a turnout of a few thousand people. In the festival, our section operated a workshop in which attendants could take part in various physical demonstrations. The workshop attracted numerous people, young and old, most of whom had little day to day interaction with physics and science in general. Some were interested in the physical background of the experiments, while other were content with just witnessing the show.
Highlights of our demonstrations included:
- potato cannons and a catapult which people could use to shoot at pre-made targets;
- bottle rockets which could be launched in the air with pressure created by the release of CO2 from the reaction of baking soda with vinegar;
- a mixture of corn starch and water, which changes its apparent viscosity depending on the way it is handled;
- a demonstration with different color dyes that were placed inside glycerol, then slowly, carefully stirred until they seemed to have mixed. The dyes were then unmixed by stirring the liquid backwards;
- an electronic 1 vs 1 reaction game set up on a breadboard and operated by Raspberry Pi;
- the creation of dense mist by pouring water onto dry ice.
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