4-H SET

 

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Video Transcript

Nat Sound
"Three, two, one!"

Chuck Denney (UT Institute of Agriculture)
We have lift-off. A well-designed paper rocket with aerodynamic fins can fly high, boosted by compressed air and the imagination.

Nat Sound
“It’s just cool stuff. Fun.”

Chuck Denney
These short journeys into space are just one activity at Camp Explore at the Austin 4-H Center in Greeneville - part of the SET or Science, Engineering and Technology program. These camps are also held in Crossville and Columbia throughout the school year. Organizers hope kids are having so much fun, they don’t realize they’re learning.

Jerry Rhinehardt (Austin 4-H Center)
“We want to instill a love for science in children. Hopefully I’d like for them to come here and have a learning experience that’s kind of accidental, where they become a part of it and learn by doing.”

Chuck Denney
4-H is the youth development program for UT Extension - so science and 4-H are natural partners with this tie-in to our state’s largest land grant university. This program allows kids to ask questions, explore new ideas, and maybe make a discovery or two. 4-H SET includes playing around with a Van de Graff generator in a physics lab, which produces an electronic bad hair day.Here positive and negatively charged electrons collide, and then race through the body of someone who touches the dome. It’s a hair-raising experience to say the least, and 4-H leaders hope experiments like this will get kids interested in possible careers in science

Sarah Daugherty (4-H'er)
“Yeah, I love science. It’s like my favorite subject in school. What do you like about it? I like that we get to do a bunch of experiments and get to try it out - instead of sitting there listening to a teacher drone on and one everyday.”

Chuck Denney
SET puts basic sciences under the microscope for kids - subjects like biology and chemistry. There’s also a dose of environmental topics like conservation and wildlife. It’s hoped that kids will be eaten up by a passion for learning.

Daniel Sarver (State 4-H Office)
“When that sense of adventure sparks the kids’ imagination, that’s where the learning really takes place. They take it home. They talk to their parents about it. They say ‘Hey Mom and Dad, I did this. I did that.”

Chuck Denney
Our whole world, indoors and out, can be one big laboratory. But to first produce good science, we need future scientists.

END

NOTE: Across the country, more than six million kids are involved in 4-H.
National organizers have a goal of adding another one million through the S-E-T program by 2013.