The Heads on Fire Community

It all started Monday July 6, 2009, when I came in to the fab lab for the first time for my internship. The nerves were getting to me because I didn't know what to expect or what was to be expected of me. I just was glad that I knew that I was going to be working with two of my friends from school named Zaira and Miriam. As soon as we came in the door we were greeted and told the basis of or work and the project we were going to be involved with. We were also told that we were going to be working with middle school kids, we were going to become their mentors. We were shown around the fab lab by a guy named Esteban and he gave us a very fast tour of the fab lab by showing us all the cool machines and he even demonstrated for us what one of the machines can do, how it can make designs by using a laser. After that we were informed that we were going to be visiting and working at UCSD. We fallowed our driver and supervisor Lemar Slater to the van that was going to be our vehicle that would take us to UCSD and back to the fab lab for the next three days. When we got to UCSD we met Dr. Trefts who would be giving us review on certain things and also demonstrating the functions of some of the devices and utensils used in labs or to collect data. He started us off by giving us a pre-test on some of the things we should know, basic knowledge, although it was a little hard for us three because we couldn't remember some of stuff that was in the test. After that one of the kids that we were going to be working with arrived and he introduced himself to us, his name was Junior. Mr.Trefts went over the metric measures and he emphasized a lot on that because he said we needed to know that because it is very important. After that we were each given a triple beam balance wich we zeroed first of course and then we were told that we were going to be doing a lab which consisted on us finding the density of a penny. We used the balance to get the mass and a graduated cylinder and water to get the volume and the displacement the penny would make after putting it in the graduated cylinder. We at first tried putting just one penny in but found out that there was not enough displacement so i ended up doing it with ten penny's. We collected data and used the formula density equals mass over(divided) by volume and got that the density of a penny was 7.5g/ml. That concluded our first day at UCSD but when we went back to the fablab we stayed because there was a conferenceabout fablabs with China. It was really interesting hearing a lot of facts about fablabs that I didn't know and how they are located all around the world and the way they inspire kids to think,create, and learn.

On Tuesday July 7,2009 we met at the fablab again and soon after being introduced to another middle school kid named Korey we headed out to our journey back to UCSD. We met Dr.Trefts again and he passed article from the Reader about Polyheme. We learned that Polyheme is a blood substitute that is used sometimes with patients that had some kind of injury that caused them to loose a lot of blood, although it may seem like a very good thing is very controversial because of the problems that may come with it. The article basically was talking about how some of the subjects treated with polyheme died and how recently there has been secretly testing distributed through out diferent places without the people knowing about it or without their permission to do so. After having a discussion about what we had read Mr. Trefts told us that we were going to do a lab in which we were going to use Vitamin C, a mint substance and some other unknown chemicals. We also were going to use the spectrophometer to find out the concentration of the Vitamin C and the mint when mixed with the other liquid.