The college experiment

They played with robots, looked at the planet Jupiter and armadillo skeletons, and even dug for fossils.

Thousands of elementary school children descended on OCC for the ninth annual “Community Science Night.” Every year, the school gives out free tickets at schools throughout Newport-Mesa, Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley, Westminster and Garden Grove for kids to have a night of weird science — and maybe even learn a thing or two.

In the marine science labs, kids dug their hands into wet sand to dig out hermit crabs or played with sea stars and other creatures in a makeshift touch tank.

“Aah! That’s sticky!” Paularino Elementary student Philip Park said to his peers. “Hey, everybody touch this sea anemone.”

“It thinks you’re trying to eat it,” OCC student and volunteer Erin Damm explained to the children. “That’s why all of its coral arms are pulling in like that.”

Minutes later, Philip dashed over to a new exhibit, a vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano.

“I really like science,” he said.

Over in the physics lab, instructor Abbas Faridi spun a coiled contraption that generated static electricity, making a big enough spark between two electrodes to burn a hole through paper.

“The buildup of charge ionizes the air,” he said. “It’s the same mechanism that makes lightning.”

In the human anatomy exhibit, kids were looking at real human stomachs, lungs, spleens and bones — even a “trichobezoar,” a human hairball.

Captions pointed out “smoker’s lung” or “brain damaged by alcohol,” apparently as a kind of public service announcement.

Tina Lopez, 8, of Garden Grove, said she liked the purple plastic necklace she won for matching pictures of human organs to their first letters, but she found the room a bit much.

“The lung was gross,” she said.

But fourth-grader Jenna Gatto, of Westminster, waiting in line to see Jupiter on a hefty telescope that used motors to compensate for the Earth’s motion, said she liked the chemistry lab best so far.

“They were making ice cream,” she said — with liquid nitrogen. “And they let you eat it.”

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at [email protected].