In late September, JILA took its science to Boulder’s Twenty Ninth Street shopping mall, to rave reviews.

On a sunny, breezy Saturday afternoon, crowds of kids and parents marveled at the magic of JILAn Ed Meyer’s levitron, as its spinning top appeared to defy the laws of gravity by floating effortlessly in thin air. The assembled families oohed and aahed as they gobbled up the liquid nitrogen ice cream conjured in a stainless steel soup cauldron by Fellow Heather Lewandowski. Even the most skeptical were fascinated by post doc Laurel Mayhew’s demonstrations of how light diffracts into colors.

Meyer, ever the magician, allowed the kids to try and make the magic happen themselves.

"I had one kid who was really intent on understanding why it worked," Meyer says. "He was more than happy to keep trying to make the top float. It was interesting to see him work hard to understand what was going on."

The event that garnered this assembly at Twenty Ninth Street was called Science Saturday. Eight local science institutions — NCAR, NIST, SSI, LASP, NOAA, NREL, and JILA — have interactive kiosk displays at the mall, and all had representatives at Science Saturday. NCAR volunteers delighted kids with a "Climate Walk" and a hands-on demonstration of how fat protects animals from extreme cold. LASP staff had them building and launching paper rocket ships. NIST volunteers spent the afternoon smashing liquid nitrogen-soaked carnations and freezing soap bubbles. And, of course, JILAns fed both their curiosity and their stomachs.

Twenty Ninth Street’s effort to take science out of the classroom and present it to families where they congregate for retail therapy is not unique. It’s been done before, in Aspen’s Snowmass Village, for example. But it is innovative. And it’s a venue that brings kids, families, and scientists together to learn, explore, and have fun in the process.

JILAns offered up the fun in abundance. In addition to Meyer’s levitron, Lewandowski’s ice cream, and Mayhew’s light diffraction demonstrations, kids and parents were treated to CU’s Physics Education Technology (PhET) Project’s interactive physics simulations, which ran simultaneously on three laptop computers. They were so popular that the line to use the computers was at least three deep all afternoon. Meanwhile, JILAn Allison Churnside delighted the younger set by using bowls of water and glass to demonstrate how light can be divided into different colors. And over in Lewandowski’s ice cream tent, JILAn Michele Olsen wowed the crowd with her highly creative Jello laser demo.

"It's nice to reach out to whole families, as opposed to just kids at a school-based event," Churnside says. "That's because it might spark conversations about the things they saw together."

Perhaps the most important take away from JILA’s participation in Science Saturday is that science can attract kids outside of the classroom. Indeed, JILA science can be cool anywhere. —Nancy Nachman-Hunt

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