Now, you can ask and find out too. You Can With Beakman and Jax, the innovative Sunday cartoon strip that helps kids (and adults) around the world understand how the world works through colorful, easy-to-do experiments using household objects, comes to life at San Francisco's Exploratorium from March 26-May 1. A new hands-on exhibit, Experiment with Beakman and Jax includes over 35 large scale cartoon strips and 20 hands-on exhibits that demonstrate the real phenomena explored by the informative, yet humorous, cartoons on display.
In addition, a special Tinkerers' Space within the exhibition is designed for children and families to rig up their own Beakman and Jax experiments, right inside the Exploratorium. Using such everyday items as paper, straw, cardboard boxes, aluminum foil, and flashlights, the object is to explore science along with the You Can With Beakman and Jax cartoons.
Among the topics explored by the cartoons, exhibits, and hands-on experiments of the Experiment with Beakman and Jax exhibition are sound, resonance, mathematics, heat, temperature, melting things, electromagnetics, water (hydrodynamics), and aerodynamics. For example, come admire the artwork, information, and humor of a cartoon that explains how an airplane flies. Then play with a popular Exploratorium exhibit that uses a modified orange traffic cone and a beach ball to let you experience the lift that also acts on an airplane wing . You can feel how the ball is sucked into the air stream coming out of the cone and how the pressure on the top of an airplane wing would be the same. Called the Bernoulli effect, it produces a suction which holds the airplane up, or more accurately, the high pressure on the bottom of the wing pushes the airplane up and balances the downward effect of gravity. Try your own aerodynamics experiments in the Tinkerer's Space, where you can make your own airplane wing out of paper, just like in the cartoon, and see how planes lift off the ground and stay up. Or you can tinker with lift by making your own personal mini Bernoulli Blower out of a flexi-straw and a ping-pong ball.
Beakman and Jax answer pressing questions of everyday science in response to over 300 letters a day, whether it's young Bill's question,"Do airplanes fly because they go so fast? My brother runs with his arms out and thinks he will fly;" or this question, "How does a camera work?" from another Bill, who just happens to be President of the United States! You Can With Beakman and Jax regularly appears in 250 newspapers nationwide, including many in the Bay Area. The cartoon is also read in China, Pakistan, Australia, Canada and India, to name just a few foreign countries.
In the words of Jok Church, creator of the nationally syndicated cartoon strip You Can with Beakman and Jax, "Beakman and Jax have truly come home. The cartoon strip was inspired by the Exploratorium, where how the world works is made exciting yet obvious with the use of one part self-discovery, one part experimentation, and three parts fun. " Church, a resident of San Rafael, CA, just over the Golden Gate bridge, has lived near the Exploratorium for years. Says Church, "I love the Exploratorium. Instead of getting a job there, I translated the essence of the place into another medium." You Can with Beakman and Jax has itself inspired a very popular and exciting new TV show.
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