Voice of the Mid-Columbia | Kennewick, Pasco and Richland, Wash. |
Print
E-Mail
tool name
closeSunday, Oct. 25, 2009
Science of sharing: Park ranger volunteers to teach homeschooled children
By John Trumbo, Herald staff writer
RICHLAND -- The eyes on the 15 young faces were fixed forward.
A man wearing a black T-shirt with a Tyrannosaurus rex snarling on the front carefully attached electric wires to a pair of metal forks protruding from a large dill pickle suspended between a pair of uprights.
The stage set, Mark Finkbeiner silently eased to the wall switch near the door and flipped off the room lights.
Seconds later, he tripped another switch and voltage zapped through wires to the forks.
"Pzzwzzt, snap, crackle" sounds accompanied an eerie glow emanating from within the pickle.
The thing was being electrified from the inside-out.
Rather than bursting from the energy overload -- or at least come to life like a vegetable Frankenstein -- the spectacle simply danced and spat out sounds.
"Cool," said one youthful observer.
"Wow," said another.
The electricity flowed through the juices in the pickle, Finkbeiner explained, knowing from the looks on the faces of the students that the experiment had been successful.
This is how the 46-year-old, self-taught scientist spends Friday mornings for three months each winter, teaching science to dozens of homeschooled students who gather weekly for enrichment classes at Columbia Community Church in Richland.
ECHO, which stands for Enriching Christian Homeschool Organization, offers a variety of 14 classes for more than 230 students through high school age using volunteer teachers. Finkbeiner has been their science guy for four years.
Finkbeiner's day job is resident ranger at Benton County's Horn Rapids Park. But science is his avocational passion.
"I've been learning as I go along. It's the discovery and the unlocking mysteries of the universe that keeps me interested," Finkbeiner said during a break between classes on a recent day at ECHO.
Growing up as the youngest child in a family of six siblings, Finkbeiner's curiosity was encouraged by his parents. They gave him a chemistry set and a meteorology set when he was in elementary school. That led to experiments in the basement where he could do little harm, and eventually to an interest in rockets, which took him outside.
His fifth-grade teacher nurtured Finkbeiner's love of science, making him his assistant in rocketry activities at the school.
"We had a lot of fun," he recalls.
That's one reason why Finkbeiner has started a rocket club for ECHO students, with the first big blast off day set Saturday.
Watching Finkbeiner construct experiments for ECHO students confirms that he still has that child's curiosity about the how and whys of the physical science world.
A recent class had him using nitric acid to dissolve copper pennies, demonstrating how nitrous dioxide gas forms, and then reacts with water to turn a brown residual into a bright blue liquid. It was a lesson in chemical reactions that produce heat and pressure followed by cooling that induced a vacuum.
A second experiment showed how five super magnets about the size of quarters and attached to the bottom of flashlight batteries taped together at the ends could be made into an electrical motor. A loop of copper wire placed over the magnets and batteries suddenly began spinning, as if by magic.
Using diagrams, Finkbeiner explained that the magnets caused the batteries to produce an invisible electrical field that made the copper loop spin. The secret?
"Electrons," he said.
"This is where we got the idea for an electric starter motor. Thanks to Michael Faraday who discovered this principle in the 1820s," Finkbeiner told the students.
Last year, Finkbeiner thrilled his students weekly with exothermic reactions. Every week was a new flash-bang lesson.
Finkbeiner said he gets some of his ideas from a school teacher in California who sells CDs with experiments and lessons. He also has a friend at Hanford who tutors him.
"I love finding out about the power of atoms and how communication can occur from one side of the other in seconds. And I really love lasers," he said.
Finkbeiner remembers a brother-in-law who worked with lasers sparking his interest 30 years ago during a visit to a laser facility in Seattle.
And it was his mother taking him to see the moon rocks at the Richland federal building in the 1970s that opened his imagination to the universe. "That really inspired me," he said.
But just about anything connected with science interests Finkbeiner. He has an 8-inch telescope and a binocular microscope, both of which will be introduced to his students in coming weeks.
"We'll be looking at everything from the sun to rocks, bugs and flowers. It all helps unlock the mysteries of God," he said.
But there was a time when Finkbeiner walked away from science because as a Christian he couldn't accept evolution.
"All I was ever taught was evolution, so I became disinterested in science," he said.
Then, when he was past college and in his mid-20s, Finkbeiner heard that science fits with the Bible in ways he'd not known.
"When I found that out, my interest was rekindled," he said.
Sharing the discoveries with students gives Finkbeiner a chance to show the connections between science and the Bible, he said.
And it has led to opportunities for speaking at schools and churches, and invitations to go to the Philippines and Cambodia to do presentations.
Last summer, Finkbeiner had a rare chance to go on a dinosaur dig in Wyoming, where a nearly complete allosaurus was unearthed.
"I was right there with the right people -- the experts," he said.
He has been to Colorado and Texas in search of other dinosaur sites, too.
After years of playing with science, Finkbeiner is about to take a leap of faith. Although he had studied in college for criminal justice, Finkbeiner's passion for science is leading him to get a formal education on the subject.
"I'm going for a degree in physical science at Washington State University," he said.
* John Trumbo: 509-582-1529; jtrumbo@tricityherald.com
@Nyx.CommentBody@