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Reporting to you from the front lines of the fast food experiment. Day 8 (Day 5 for the homemade) has brought forth some fascinating arrivals. Every food container has developed some form of mold, typically in the fries. This has been a very unexpected development. All I did was take the food items straight from their bags and place them in the containers. All items are molding and it has started first with the fries. I thought for sure it would start with the burgers/buns because of the meat and cheese. I guess I was wrong.Check out this photo of the Wendy's burger from today and see more on Flickr to see daily updates of the experiment. I'm both excited and nervous about what I will see when I come back on Monday from the weekend!

Well, it's official: Wendy's french fries have begun to mold! I was curious which fast food place would start to show mold, and I thought Wendy's might be first with their new slogan: "Fresh, Never Frozen."See that mold right there in the middle?

This bodes well for them, however, I was surprised it was the fries that molded first. I was expecting it to be the cheeseburger. Check out the photos here and look for more at our Flickr photo page! Look closely and you will see.

Visitors to the Taylor Community Science Resource Building in the last week may have noticed a new addition to the walls by the teen room. Fuzzy Fast Food is an experiment I've set up designed to watch what happens as a cheeseburger and fries is left to mold. I bought food from 4 major fast food chains (Burger King, Hardee's, McDonald's, Wendy's) and made one cheeseburger and fries from scratch at home.

I am curious to see which one will mold first, and if some items will not mold at all...what do you think will happen? Come by the building and check out the observations. If you wish, write down your own observations for that day!

I will post updates here as they occur.

and we here at the YES program already know how great it is, but it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy when members of the museum education community also recognize the positive contributions our YES teens make to the STL area. Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, recently blogged about her recent experience at the Taylor building and what she learned from the YES teens and our programs. Be sure to check out the picture of our very own Science Afterschool members working with students visiting from IL. They were looking for worms for an exploration activity this past spring. 

The YES program is gearing up for our summer session. Last week marked the last Saturday Learning Lab for the spring semester. However, we eagerly welcomed 57 New Teens into the program this Saturday, May 1. 

While we're waiting for summer sessions to begin let's take a look at some of the highlights of 2009-2010 year. Enjoy! 

Be sure to check our blog for more information on summer sessions and New Teen labs! 

In our final week of the spring semester we wrapped up exploring our questions around worms. We counted our worms first. We had 20 worms from the store the first week, and 20 worms we dug up in Science Corner beds. This past week, 5 weeks later, we only found13 store bought worms, and 9 Science Corner worms. Why do you think that is? We decided it could be because the worms were just difficult to find, that we didn't try long enough, or that they actually died and their bodies became too difficult to find. 

After we counted our worms we reexamined some of the questions that we had our first week. Small groups of YES teens investigated whether a worm would respond to light, why they thought the worm kept coming off the plate, how fast a worm could go, and would worms crawl toward each other. Groups conducted their experiment and then presented out to the group.