FAYETTEVILLE — Jackson Black passed his hand over the small electronic musical instrument that he had just created at the Explore Engineering Program at the University of Arkansas.
The tone emanating from the tiny speaker got louder. Then quieter.
“If I do this, it makes more or less electricity,” said Jackson, 11, of Springdale. “Apparently, I just built a phototheremin.”
Jackson was one of 24 sixth- and seventh-graders who gathered in an electrical engineering laboratory Friday morning in the university’s Bell Engineering Center.
In the afternoon, 25 eighthand ninth-graders assembled phototheremins in the same room. It was the second-consecutive day they all participated in hands-on activities during the week-long camp hosted by the university’s College of Engineering.
On Thursday, they conducted chemical-engineering experiments and programmed Lego robots.
Friday was the last day of the camp.
“Yes, sadly,” Jackson said.
As he spoke, phototheremins like the one he made were sounding off all over the room. They were powered by batteries, with the pitch controlled by the movement of a hand.
This wasn’t the theremin patented in 1928 by Russian inventor Leon Theremin, however. Instead of making eerie sounds — The Beach Boys used a theremin on the hit song “Good Vibrations” — these phototheremins produced more of a dull monotone.
“You put electricity in one end and it moves through a maze of wires and capacitors and comes out the other end,” said Jackson, who will be a sixth-grader at Hellstern Middle School this fall.
“I love to build and engineer things and tinker around,” he said.
Matthew Cline, 12, of Maumelle explained that the phototheremin makes a sound based upon how much light gets into the photo resistors on the breadboard.
“Regulators control how much voltage” was going into the instrument, he said.
(Matthew will soon be appearing on the Kids Week edition of the TV game show Jeopardy. His episode airs 11 a.m. Monday on KATV, Channel 7, in central Arkansas and 4:30 p.m. on KFSM-TV, Channel 5, in Northwest Arkansas.)
It’s the third year for the Explore Engineering Program at the university, said Eric Specking, assistant director of recruitment for the engineering college.
The college also offers an Engineering Summer Academy, a one-week residential program for high school students.
The camps for the younger students were developed as initiatives to get them interested in science, technology, engineering and math, Specking said.
It would be nice if they ended up attending the university, but that’s not the overarching goal, he said.
“We’re just trying to develop that spark,” he said.
The camp, which drew some students from surrounding states, cost $250 for the week. The fee covered snacks, lunch, a T-shirt, insurance and other related expenses.
Scholarships were sponsored by the chemical, civil, electrical, and industrial engineering departments at the university.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 07/28/2012