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Local-Northwest Herald Saturday, August 4, 2007

At the Mad Science booth at the McHenry County Fair, Carianne Sobey (from left), 13, and Marta Sobey,11, watch their sister, Michelle Sobey, 16, try to make a bridge with metal objects between magnetic poles. Mad Science is a company that teaches kids science through interactive programs and workshops. (Kristy Ann Mann photo)

Making kids mad for science

By LIZ WOLGEMUTH  

Chas Sedore has been a pedal-pull champion at the McHenry County Fair three years running, but he was scratching his head at the tabletop challenge before him.

The seventh-grader from Hebron was kneeling for a better look at the booth run by Mad Science of McHenry County, a few yards from the fair’s 4-H food tent.

Sedore faced four pillars bearing magnets like napkin rings and a bucket full of metal hardware. The object: Build bridges between the pillars, which varied in distance from one another.

“Weren’t you guys in a building last year?” Sedore said without looking away from the task at hand.

“I couldn’t complete this last year, but I was determined to come back and finish it,” he said.

Sedore was not the only fair regular who remembered the Mad Science booth. Debbie White of McHenry and Mary Schuster of Crystal Lake were running the booth on Thursday afternoon, and they saw plenty of familiar faces.

“Some kids are here the majority of the day with me,” Schuster said.

Mad Science of McHenry County, based in Algonquin, is one of 139 U.S. franchises of Montreal-based Mad Science Inc., which promotes science education through quirky, cool hands-on experiments.

The local franchise was launched by owner Susan Petersen in August 2004 and has since worked with an estimated 10,000 kids through summer camps, after-school programs, park district programs, birthday parties, and special events.

“We’ve probably added eight or nine new schools this year,” Petersen said.

Mad Science franchises are fairly low-cost startups, according to Entrepreneur Magazine, which has repeatedly rated the franchisor among the top 100 low-cost franchises.

The company began franchising in 1995 and since has built a network of 190 franchises worldwide.

Mad Science instructors throw rocket-building parties, dry-ice shows during the Halloween season, or Harry Potter-related programs that use wizard hats and flash paper. Park district programs might take kids through the science of crime scene investigations or glow-in-the-dark technologies.

At the fair, kids can shake cylinders that sound like lightning and thunder, guess at the bottled scents in a sniff test, or try to run a wire around twisting copper without touching the copper.

They also can cobble puzzles together to build arches. The youngest kids can sift through sand made of allergy-free flour to find dinosaurs and dog bones, then dust them off like an archeologist would.

“They have a lot of fun,” White said. “I think they like it because it’s hands-on.”