Allen Kurzweil’s Potato Chip Science

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Monday, October 25, 2010

Maggie Lange, GoLocalProv Correspondent

I walk into Allen Kurzweil’s beautiful, old home on Providence's Benefit Street, and strewn among the attractive antiques and preserved architecture is a bright collection of plastic pieces, Styrofoam, and crinkly metal wrapping. As he gathers the spilled components of the bag, he says, “Well this is a metaphor for who I am. All over the place.” All over the place, but focused on creativity. The spilled contents around Kurzweil’s living room are the contents of his latest invention: Potato Chip Science.

Making science fun and delicious

The Potato Chip Science kit offers 29, deliciously fun experiments – all using something to do with potato chips. To teach about acoustics, Kurzweil creates an improvised yo-yo like contraption and pulls the strings at different speeds to make a whooshing, Zen-like sound.  He then makes a toy-bird from a Pringle’s can, and uses burnt potato chips to create fingerprint powder.

The kit's accompanying book encourages using a recycling bin as a laboratory.  It repurposes trash into cool products, encouraging both physically making something and working with what you have, rather than purchasing ready-made toys.  “The principal thing,” Kurzweil says, “is to make your own fun – with an emphasis on the making and the fun.”

From fiction to (saturated) fact

Kurzweil had been writing serious literary fiction, when he son proposed a few different suggestions for his father’s career.  “First he said I should write a book about Boston Red Sox,” Kurzweil says laughing, “and then, casually, he said I should write about potato chips.” So Kurzweil's children's book, Leon and the Champion Chip, inspired a how-to science project, and Kurzweil and his son headed to the basement to experiment and make prototypes. A few years later, the non-fiction Potato Chip Science was born.

Kurzweil says that it’s easy to get kids excited about science, when science is cool. In Philadelphia, he says, he was teaching kids how to make Spud Crud, a non-Newtonian solid.  “A non-Newtonian solid means that when you pack it, it’s a solid, but when you let it go it begins to melt. This is how a bulletproof vest works; it allows the wearer to move, but when the bullet hits it, the vest becomes solid.”  With an experiment like that, Kurzweil says, Potato Chip Science can get video-game-playing-couch-potatoes into amateur chemists.

Potato Chip Science is available in stores throughout Rhode Island. For more information go to the Web site, here.

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