Media advisory/Photo opportunity: Family Fun at Colorado State University Little Shop of Physics Annual Open House Feb. 25

Note to Reporters: To see a short video about the Little Shop of Physics open house, go to YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99owQZni0Ew.

What/when:

More than 300 hands-on experiments and seven interactive presentations will be featured at Colorado State University’s 21st annual Little Shop of Physics Open House on Saturday, Feb. 25, in Fort Collins.

The open house, which is free and open to audiences of all ages, will be 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Lory Student Center on the Fort Collins campus. The Lory Student Center is near the intersection of Laurel Street and Meridian Avenue.

Details:

Nearly 7,000 visitors attended last year’s event. This year’s open house – “How Big is Your World?” – will feature dozens of brand-new, hands-on experiment stations. To name a few, there’s “The Distortionator” – a pair of helmets that make your head appear much larger or much smaller than normal; “Static Snowstorm,” which is similar to a snow globe powered by static electricity; and “Colorful Chaos,” a project that uses a television monitor and camera to make swirling, chaotic patterns.

Little Shop of Physics connects college student volunteers with more than 20,000 K-12 students in Colorado each year. The outreach program presents about 100 hands-on science stations at events that illustrate principles from motion to magnetism.

This year’s open house will include several exhibits from the Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota. In January, Little Shop of Physics received a $15,000 grant from Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) to help the Oglala Lakota College develop its own traveling hands-on science program. To date, Little Shop of Physics has reached more than 300,000 students through its in-class experiments and thousands more online.

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