“Hiding science in really fun things”: Kids gets hands-on with real research in Denver

Parker Pinney was pretending to be a fire ant in a video game. Using a handheld controller, his insect avatar raced back and forth inside the labyrinthine tubes of an enormous nest. “It’s super fun,” the 11-year-old said, his eyes glued to the monitor set up in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Standing next to Pinney, Zachariah Germain held a 3D printed plastic model of the same fire ant nest. He took questions from adults as their kids played the game.

“These tiny social insects build these nests with no supervisor,” said Germain, a graduate student at Emory University who studies these structures. He and his colleagues pour epoxy resin into the nests, excavate them, and drive them to a local hospital, where they image them inside CT machines and map their geometry. (Their impressive engineering aside, the ants are invasive and harm local wildlife and vegetation.) To convey the intricacies of these structures in an intuitive way, Germain and his colleagues built a model of the nest in the popular game Minecraft, which Pinney was playing.

Germain’s Minecraft nest was one of dozens of demos at APS’ Squishy Science Sunday outreach event on March 15, held the day before science presentations began at the APS Global Physics Summit. The event involved the work of nearly 150 volunteer physicists from about 70 institutions in eight countries, and an estimated 1,500 people visited.

Denver’s Squishy Science Sunday was the third iteration of the event, first held in Minneapolis at the APS March meeting in 2024. “We have this annual meeting of 12,000 to 15,000 physicists in a big city every year,” said Shubha Tewari, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the event’s lead organizers. “The city’s residents are kind of unaware of our existence, so we want them to not only know that we exist, but that we are doing things that are relevant to them.”

Holding the event at an existing community space — the museum — instead of the meeting conference center “was a successful approach,” said Nicole Schrode, the program manager of public engagement at APS. As the organizers could draw on the museum’s regular visitors, this year’s event attracted three times more participants than last year’s.

The event was distinctive because all the presenters were physicists actively working in research. “We’re bringing our research to you, and we're just like normal people,” said Rae Robertson-Anderson, a professor at the University of San Diego and another lead organizer. “We don't necessarily look like what you might think a physicist looks like, and we might not be doing research that you think of as typical research, and it's still physics.”

“It’s kind of like hiding vegetables in brownies,” said Pinney, a sixth grader at Denver’s Merrill Middle School and a museum regular. “They’re hiding science in really fun things.”

A little girl brushed past him holding a pillowy cotton candy — “an example of an amorphous phase transition,” said Daniel Hickox-Young, a professor at Augsburg University, who was handing them out.

The exhibits also felt fresh, compared to your classic gyroscope demo. Physicists developed several of them in the last few years as educational outreach for their fields of study. “They're literally what these people do in their research,” said Thomas O’Connor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

At one table, for example, children and adults made keychains by sandwiching drops of paint between two transparent plastic discs. When they pried the discs apart, an intricate pattern resembling tree branches formed spontaneously. These patterns are an active area of research in fluid dynamics. In some industrial processes, such as oil extraction or sugar refinement, “this is a really detrimental effect,” said Chloe Lindeman, a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University who helped put together the station. The branching causes fluids of different viscosity — air and paint in this case, or water and petroleum — to mix, making it difficult to extract the desired material. “People are looking for ways to suppress this instability,” said Lindeman.

Some of the demos even sparked scientific discussions among the physicists. At lunchtime, undergraduates Dinuka Herath and Nick Mazzoni of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst talked with Lena Koslover, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, about the finer details of a demo illustrating the so-called Brazil nut effect. In the demo, Herath and Mazzoni shook a test tube filled with marbles of different sizes. Counterintuitively, the largest marble rose to the top of the tube, much like the Brazil nut, as the largest specimen in a can of mixed nuts, is often at the top of the can. The effect plays a role in the formation of sedimentary rocks and in techniques for cleaning wastewater.

Many of the demos taught concepts from soft matter and biophysics, as the event organizers come from that community. But a few tables had demos involving quantum mechanics and plasma physics. A group from South Korea’s Center for Quantum Nanoscience brought a model showing how scanning tunneling microscopes worked, while another group from the Dresden University of Technology in Germany brought a mobile game for teaching quantum mechanics called Kitty Q.

The event was a year in the making. Robertson-Anderson and Tewari began soliciting interest in volunteers last summer. Then, working with APS, they had to scout locations for the event. Participants shipped their demos to a Denver warehouse in advance, before meeting organizers transported the 30 carefully labeled boxes to the museum. The organizers have also compiled many of the demos into a document available online called the Squishy Science Sunday Cookbook.

The organizers have already begun thinking about next year’s event, to take place in Atlanta in April. “The weather should be better, and we should be able to do some things outside,” said Tewari, as a biting wind blew outside. She and Robertson-Anderson want to fill a kiddie pool with corn starch and water to make oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid, and have people walk on it.

“We're hoping this grows,” said Robertson-Anderson. “The dream is that all of physics is represented here.”