Two coaches engaged their team in activities around small machines and magnets. Later, two boys on the team brought in working motors they had built. When the coaches asked the boys to explain how each of the three poles of the rotor became an electromagnet, one of the boys took the bar magnet, and held it up to a television set the coach had rescued from the trash. When they looked at the screen, everyone could see multicolored bands tracing the magnetic field around the magnet.

With prompting from the coach, the boy generated lots of questions about magnets:

• What makes a magnet a magnet?
• What makes a metal a metal?
• Are there magnets in nature?
• Can only copper wires make a motor spin? What about gold wires?
• What metal will be most strongly attracted to a magnet?
• What does the black paper in a speaker do?
• Will a bigger magnet make something go faster?
• Are all metals magnetic?

Team members build a paperclip electromagnet

Team members from a CTC in Chinatown, accompanied by family members, went to the city’s main park, the Boston Commons, to look at the night sky through a telescope. The coaches and team had the help of ScienceQuest’s resident science expert, Dr. Joe.

The team from the Roxbury Multiservice Center visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Once there, each young investigator took a digital photo of something of interest. Using a portable AlphaSmart keyboard, team members were able to write captions for their pictures on the spot.

Two team members pose in front of a giant crystal

A retired executive from a technology company assisted a team and its coach to take apart a computer and install a sound card. The young investigators were so fascinated that the following week, the coach brought in an abandoned video recorder from her apartment building’s trash. The team took it apart to discover the workings of magnetic tape.

A head from inside the video recorder

After building a small telescope from a kit, one team was eager to explore the moons of Jupiter, which were detected only after the invention of the telescope.