YAKIMA — The boys in the back of the room aren’t listening to Bubbly Brittany.
They’re busy using cardboard tubes as lightsabers and creating their own sound effects as the pieces clash in the middle of the aisle.
“It looks like a spaceship, doesn’t it?” one boy says to another, and he agrees. Another boy has a different idea: “It looks like a Transformer.”
Then, he changes his mind: “It looks like binoculars.”
In an hour, the pieces will resemble a rocket. Meantime, the boys follow Bubbly Brittany’s instructions.
Today’s assignment: rocket building. And it will be followed in a week or two — depending on the weather — by something even more exciting: rocket launching.
This isn’t a regular science class. It’s Mad Science.
The international franchise offers schools an array of hands-on, science-based, after-school, in-school, preschool and summer programs. There are also presentations for school assemblies, classes and special events, like open houses, family nights and birthday parties.
And it’s new to Yakima County.
Started last year by Carole Jevons, Mad Science of Yakima County provides age-appropriate, inquiry-based science programming for children in preschool through eighth grade.
While there are a handful of Mad Science programs in the Seattle area, Yakima County is the only one east of the mountains in Washington to offer the program, according to Jevons.
“It’s really interactive,” says Jevons, a former preschool teacher who moved to Yakima from the San Francisco Bay Area a year and a half ago.
Jevons, the owner as well as an instructor, employs five other part-time instructors who travel to public and private schools, libraries and other locations to host classes and conferences on topics like acids and bases, kitchen chemistry, dry ice, bugs, plants, gravity and weather.
“I really like working with the kids,” says Mad Science instructor 19-year-old Brittany Waywell, otherwise known as Bubbly Brittany. And, “I love shooting off rockets.”
Waywell, a 2008 West Valley High School graduate, is currently teaching five different classes for up to 25 students.
“It keeps them doing something productive after school instead of watching TV,” she says.
After-school programs can be tailored to accommodate different age groups as well as to relate to school curriculum. It costs $69 or $89 per student, depending on whether the class runs for six or eight weeks. The cost can be picked up by parents, schools or groups like Parent-Teacher Associations or booster clubs.
Instructors take on fun names — like Bubbly Brittany — and wear white lab coats that say “Mad Scientist” on the front and “Sparking Imaginative Learning” on the back.
Earlier this fall, room 209 at St. Paul Cathedral School turned into a science lab for an hour per week after school. During one class, three instructors in white coats started the lesson by showing students — there were just over 20 of them — photos of rockets. They asked the kids questions, like “What’s a launch pad?” and “What makes a rocket go?”
Mad Science recently partnered with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, to offer curriculum called the Academy of Future Space Explorers. During the session, students at St. Paul constructed and launched rockets, learned about lunar eclipses, and studied comets and the lives of astronauts.
And they’re not the only ones. Since its inception, Mad Science has hosted programs at schools in the Yakima, Selah, West Valley and East Valley school districts, as well as private schools like St. Joseph-Marquette.
This week the session is wrapping up at Yakima’s Nob Hill Elementary School, where 10 students meet after school in a portable on Tuesdays.
Just like at St. Paul, the boys sit in the back of this class, too. There are four of them, including 8-year-old Giovanni Rivero, a third-grader who says science is his favorite subject. In Mad Science, he says, “I learn a lot, like how space is.”
Devon Becker, another 8-year-old third-grader, says she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up.
“It’s so great to be in Mad Science,” she says. “I’ve learned about atmospheres of planets and played games about planets. It’s fun. You learn lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of things.”
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