Here’s a recipe for fun: 38 high school chemistry teachers, a bag of potatoes, several aluminum tubes and dowels, a big roll of duct tape and three enthusiastic presenters. Add a little explosive material and a sunny day at UC Merced and mix thoroughly.

That’s just part of the equation for this week’s Flinn Chemistry Workshop hosted by the School of Natural Sciences at UC Merced.

“I’m a first year teacher,” said Preet Ostwald of Ceres High School. “I was scared to teach chemistry before I came here, but now I know what to do.”

Don Payne, an enthusiastic veteran teacher from Carondelet High School in Concord, agreed.

“A new teacher can come to this workshop and be completely set up with all the labs and demonstrations,” he said. “The students deserve that – some fun, some reward. They learn better.”

The teachers were at UC Merced all week, learning new activities and building teaching devices to take back to their schools. Thursday afternoon saw the entire group out on the quad shooting potato-powered rockets and even an egg gun.

They also took back first-hand experience with the newest UC campus, having stayed in on-campus housing and used UC Merced labs and facilities all week long.

“I was reading through the brochures Krista [Venicia] provided, and noticed professors who got Ph.D.s at MIT and Berkeley,” said Hayes. “You guys are obviously making the effort to hire the best.”

About half the teachers came from the Central Valley, with others coming in from the Bay Area, Los Angeles and even as far away as Illinois and Arkansas. They got a taste of Merced-style fun at Lake Yosemite and the Thursday market downtown.

The Flinn workshop was the capstone of a summer of K-12 education outreach projects for UC Merced’s School of Natural Sciences. The school also hosted students from the Math Engineering Science Achievement program and a program by the Higher Education Consortium of Central California for physics teachers, and has worked with the UC Merced Police Department Mentoring program to teach science to local students from Alicia Reyes Elementary School.