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Level I (ages 9-11) Level II (ages 11-15)
The Incredible Machine (formerly the Exploratory Science Class)
A hundred trillion cells…60,000 miles of blood vessels…100 billion nerve cells…a heart that will beat 2.5 billion times in a 75 year life…DNA that is copied at a rate of 5000 pairs a second…and it all works…usually. During a day in the city, an average person inhales 20 billion particles of foreign material, yet the air in our lungs is virtually free of debris. The same fingers that possess the strength to crush a walnut can also pick up an ant without injuring it. From the time you are an 8 week-old fetus until the time you are born, your brain adds 250,000 cells an hour. You are truly an amazing piece of engineering. In this course you will explore and measure…yourselves! How strong are you? What’s your blood type? Do I really see in color? How much air do my lungs hold? We will also talk about what happens when things go wrong. Why do we get sick? What are cancer and diabetes? How can a virus hurt you? Why do we grow old? Many of our classes will involve hooking students up to computers and measuring how different parts of our bodies work. Then we will put some of our body’s systems to the test!!
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