The Physics Factory

More desert - themed imagery on the Bickel Bus! Friendly saguaro by Delaney Marie Thomas and Damian Arroyo!

Physics Bus comes right to your door Direct approach to teaching future scientists starts with access.

We're having an awesome time in California!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaJN3w0NPSk

Kip Perkins director of Physics Factory Community Science Workshop speaks about The Physics Bus duri Kip Perkins director of Physics Factory Community Science Workshop speaks about The Physics Bus during a visit to Alisal Community Elementary School By: Davi...

Alas, bureaucracy and the Fates have joined forces to quash summer camps this year - a dark day for the erstwhile highlight of my year. The shop at Howenstine is empty, and my backyard and little house are more than full. A victim of my own hoarding of esoterica, I've been digging out from under a mountain of things no one will buy at a yard sale. The upside is that I'll soon create and midwife the newest Physic Bus (the mothership is in Ithaca, and is the extraordinary triumph of Erik Herman, a co-founder of the Physics Factory here over 10 years ago). It's smaller sibling is in Gainesville Florida, on permanent spring break, but winning the hearts of little scientists down there as quickly as it can before Miami Beach turns into Atlantis.

It makes me very sad not to have camp. There are so many recidivists I've become attached to, and every year wonderful new intrepid designers, creators, artists, sculptors and inventors join our eclectic merry band. I anguish these days about the inevitable withdrawal I'll have from not basking in the joy and horror of the resourcefulness of those still unmolded minds.The sheer lunacy of a camp that, by all rights, should have been condemned by any parent who expected to pick up a child bearing a resemblance to the one they had dropped off only seven hours before, is probably why I loved it so much. It takes an intrepid parent and a leap (of faith) that dwarfs Neil Armstrong's to leave your child under my auspices, albeit it solicitously shielded from abject disaster by a first rate team of instructors.

Thank you all, wonderful participants and supporters of the Physics Factory camps. The new bus will be "a thing of wonder" (a carefully turned phrase that provides a vast expanse for interpretation).

I hope we can stay in touch, as I am a sentimental old fool.

Perennially unable to find a suitable way to sign off, and not quite ready to adopt the now prevalent "cheers" (though I have no objection to it),

Kip