National Chemistry Week 2009
The Orange County, CA, section of the ACS celebrated NCW at the Santa Ana Zoo. This is a small community zoo committed to education programs, especially for the surrounding, mostly Hispanic, area of Santa Ana in Orange County. Thirteen local college and university groups brought students to help the kids in attendance at the zoo with chemistry experiments from "Nails for Breakfast?" (iron in cereal) to "Pennies to Silver" (immersion plating of copper). Due to vigorous outreach publicity in the local school district, as well as with the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, more 1442 people attended the event at the zoo (528 children between ages 3 and 12), with more than 250 volunteers to assist with the experiments. The day also featured "Rudy's Radical Science Show" at midday.
Since residents of Santa Ana were eligible for free admission to the zoo on that day, we were able to track our success with the local school district. 616 people asked for free admission, so we had a huge chunk of our attendance from our specially targeted audience of Hispanic children and their families.
Click here for pictures of National Chemistry Week 2008
