Field Trip to UCSD!!!

Ok so me and my friends began as inters at the Fab lab on July 6, 2009, here we were told by Xavier that we would be mentors for little middle school kids and that we where going to be visiting and working for a while at UCSD. Lemar was kind enough to drive us back and forth from UCSD so, Thank you Lemar! So as we began our adventure into learning more about the health issues in our community we were introduced to Dr. Trefts and our little middle school kid named junior.Dr. Trefts was kind enough to give us a little quiz when we first got there, it was a piece of cake….sort of. So as we finished our torture quiz Dr. Trefts began to explain to use all the different type of equipment used in a lab, for example a beaker, graduated cylinder, micro pipette and other fancy stuff. He also explained metrics and how they worked and how it could be converted into many other measurements. After that we did a little lab which meant getting the density of a penny. We got to use 311g balance to get the mass and a graduated cylinder to get the volume. the formula we used was density equals mass divided by volume or, d=m/v. Its the same thing just shorter by the way, anyway the data we collected we use and in the end we figured that the density of a penny is 7.5g/ml. So seeing as how that experiment was a success we took our leave back to the Fab lab. After getting there Esteban, a staff member from the Fab lab helped us get some cool designs we made on photobucket on our free notebooks given to us at UCSD. That was all for our first day at UCSD but i suspected more learning adventures to come.

On July 7, 2009, our second day at UCSD we met with Dr. Trefts again and we were introduced to another middle school kid named Korey. Dr. Trefts gave a us an article form the reader talking abut Polyheme. Polyheme is a type of substitution for blood for patients who have injuries that have caused them to loose large amounts of blood. This article consisted of telling the readers of this treatment that has not been approved and that it is being tested on patients with out them knowingly accepting to it. It has been said that most of the deaths have been because of the treatment but nothing has yet been proven but till then certain medics will continue to try to get it approved b the FDA. After that Dr. trefts showed us ow to use the spectrophotometer by using vitamin c and different consentrations to get the data of absorbenices. We then collected all the data and made a graph to plot the points in our data. We were asked to put the best fit line and the line came out to be alittle curvy but also kind of straight. We also use mint liquid with a small consentration and found the absobencies. This experiment was mainly so that we could see what its is like to carry out an expieriment in a lab.

On July 8, 2009, We met again with Dr. Trefts and this time we disscused more about health. We began by learing about what the blood does in ur sysem and the route it takes throught your heart. After that we got to use the T83 calculator and the labpro to get the temperature or first cold water then immediatly warm water.