Making science “cool” is something high-school teachers have been trying to do for centuries. If only more of them knew about Jacob, Elaine and Leticia, the college students behind sci-fi-novel worthy project Fusion in a Bubblegum Machine. The group’s goal is to build a fusor reactor inside of a (you guessed it) common, store-bought bubblegum machine. Although most of the machine is being constructed from scavenged parts, the trio need to fund those bits that can’t be built from scratch — like Deuterium Gas. How ‘bout that? Pretty cool, eh?
Read what they had to say about their project below. Support them here.
This concept behind your idea is really interesting. Where did you come up with it?
We were initially planning on building just a normal farnsworth fusor reactor, one with a metal vacuum container, to help us get some practical engineering experience. But during our first meeting I was drawing designs on the whiteboard and they kinda looked like a gumball machine. And I just figured, why not build something non-engineers would find interesting as well.
Has something like this been done before? Any examples you look to for inspiration?
I’ve never heard of a fusor being built to fit in a bubblegum machine but there are a few amateur fusioneers. We got a lot of inspiration from Brian McDermott.
How have people been responding to your use of Kickstarter so far?
People like the idea. About half of the backers are friends who we told about the project and signed up to kickstarter to pledge. Also we had a good experience with our first major backer, Jason Wells. He actually emailed and gave us some advice on editing our page to make it more non-engineer friendly as wellas offered to ship us some pretty useful electronics parts.
Your rewards include really cool stuff (Felted Sub-Atomic Particles, “Irradiated” Candy, a Sculpted Flying Spaghetti Monster) — where did you come up with these ideas? How have people’s responses been to them?
I have zero artistic tallent so at first the prizes were kinda boring, like a shirt, a month of tutoring, a small bottle of deuterium. Thankfully, I realized offering actual chemicals, as safe as they are, may not be the best idea. So I asked Elaine if she could felt some chemicals. She thought the project was cool and offered the Flying Spaghetti Monster as well as her skills to sculpt/felt anything people wanted. As for the irradiated candy prizes, we figured our project is a BUBBLGUM fusion reactor we should at least have one candy related prize. The prize that’s gotten the most positive response has not too surprisingly been the Watercolors by Leticia. This prize came about when Leticia got a cool idea for a watercolor when she saw our “prototype” and offered to donate it as well as paint the thank you notes. So really most of the prizes are just what everyone who wanted to help out could make with a fusion spin.
Closing thoughts?
The response on Kickstarter has been far more than I expected. Though I would say we could have reached a lot more people if we started using things like Twitter and Facebook earlier on and to a greater extent.
