Volunteering at Imagination Station, again

Last year, a group of friends and I volunteered at PBS's Imagination Station event, which features fun and educational activities for young children who are fans of PBS Kids television programming. This year, we did it again. I was assigned to one of two Sid the Science Kid rooms, fortunately the one for slightly older children.

I and one of my friends managed the electricity table. When children arrived, I showed them a "circuit" with one wire missing and then lit up the bulb by making that connection, explaining that electricity only flows when there's a circuitous path. I increased the brightness of the bulb by inserting additional batteries.

Nearby, we were provided with several question-and-answer sheets. Each cell in the table had a metal pin through it, and wires on the back connected each question to its answer. When the children touched one free wire of a bulb-and-battery apparatus to the question and the other wire to its answer, the bulb lit. For some reason, the division quiz had several questions with the same numerical answer, but there was one answer choice per question and only one instance of the answer worked. Since that would not do, my partner and I inserted wires on the back as appropriate to make all copies of each answer electrically equivalent.

My favorite demonstration and knowledge fragment of the event - which I only remembered late in the day - was that batteries add or subtract brightness (i.e. voltage) from the circuit depending on their direction relative to the other batteries. It was interesting to hear the children's attempted explanations of that phenomenon; some came much closer than others.

Two more college decisions

Apparently 'tis the season to hear back from colleges.

• Reed College, accepted! They even sent the admission letter in a nice box, with confetti folded inside it. Their first-year humanities course has a focus on the Iliad, and they included a copy of that book too.
• University of Chicago, waitlisted. Interesting.

More admission decisions

A few more college admission decisions came in since last post:

• UC San Diego, accepted! This is looking like a very good option.
• MIT, rejected. Not surprising.
• Washington University, rejected. Somewhat surprising, but I had about zero interest in actually attending there after getting accepted in a couple other places, so no disappointment.

Accepted to a place

A couple months ago, I sent off applications to a handful of colleges. I got automatically accepted (based on test scores and classes taken) to Iowa quite a while ago. Today, I heard back from the first Regular Decision, non-automatically-inspected application: University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). When I logged into the online application, I was greeted with this message filling the screen:

That's an acceptance! There are plenty of schools I've yet to hear from, but the University of Illinois is a very nice place and I would be very happy to go there.

Submit all the college applications

Today I submitted the last five of my college applications. I proofread the essays - so many of them - one last time and copied them from Word into the appropriate text box. Then I finalized the applications through their respective portals (mostly Common App, fortunately) and sent SAT scores to the college.

It feels really good to have them all done. Results will arrive in a few months with the first one coming in February. Right now, I am really happy to finish out the year with these handled.

Student Hunger Drive 2016

Today was Loading Day, the final day of the Quad Cities Student Hunger Drive. Yesterday, I packed up and staged the last of the donated food so it could be easily moved into the truck.

When the moving truck arrived, we quickly discovered a problem: the food we purchased from Hy-Vee had already been loaded into it, and that moving the truck a little bit caused the packaging on the pallets to burst and release individual cans all over the place. We had to very carefully open the door a tiny bit so we could grab some without stacks of partially torn open, individually sealed 12-packs falling and crushing us.

Once that was dealt with (by having a few people crawl in through the slightly open door and stack the packs correctly), we loaded locally collected boxes from the staging area into the truck.

Then we all drove to the River Bend Food Bank to unload. That went well; they fortunately had a port with a lower height so they could forklift the non-toppled pallet away without us having to rip up the packaging.

After they weighed our submissions, we learned that the school raised over 11,000 pounds (including the +2,000 bonus for winning the skit competition). That will provide several thousand meals.

Don't wear a "volunteer" shirt to a different event

Many months ago, I volunteered for a FIRST Tech Challenge robotics event. They gave me a T-shirt that says "FIRST" on the front.

Last week, I attended a cultural event at the Figge art museum. That morning, I happened to put on that shirt. At first, since none of the people I knew had arrived yet, I was standing alone. One person came up to me and asked where a certain room was. I had no idea, and I had no idea why she asked me.

Only later did I realize that my shirt said "VOLUNTEER" in large letters on the back.

Oops.