Little Shop of Physics open house set for Feb. 25

Colorado State University’s 21st annual Little Shop of Physics open house on Saturday, Feb. 25, will feature 300 hands-on experiments and seven interactive presentations that illustrate scientific principles from motion to magnetism and make science fun.

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

This year’s event 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. With funding from the Google grant, the CSU team eventually plans to extend the same opportunities to other tribal colleges and education centers.

Little Shop of Physics was one of only 26 organizations worldwide — 13 of those in the United States — to be awarded a Google grant for enrichment in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, known as STEM.

Little Shop of Physics connects college student volunteers with more than 20,000 K-12 students in Colorado each year. To date, Little Shop of Physics has reached more than 300,000 students through its in-class experiments and thousands more online.

“We want kids to see that the world is a larger and more amazing place than they may have suspected and that they can be part of the process of learning about it,” said Brian Jones, CSU physics instructor and director of Little Shop of Physics, which he created. “That’s our core message.”

This year’s open house is “How Big is Your World?” Nearly 7,000 visitors attended last year’s event, and more than 100 volunteers from the CSU and Fort Collins communities will be on hand to help.
To see a short video from last year’s open house, go to YouTube .