02x02 - Mother Nature's Shoes

[bunniefuu]

[girls] S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] We need you

[girls] S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] Come on!

When I need help, and I've got a question

there's a place I go for inspiration

Gotta get to the Web, check the girls' investigation

What girls?

[Izzie] SciGirls!

Whoo!

[girls] S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] I need you!

[girls] S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] Come on!

You've gotta log on, post,

upload, pitch in! Yeah!

Wanna get inside a world that's fascinating?

The time is right 'cause SciGirls are waiting,

[girls] S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] We need you!

[girls] S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S

[Izzie] SciGirls!!

Izz, you ready?

I'm ready.

[chuckles] Okay, ready for what?

Uh, to become a sign on the Vegas Strip?

WhatNo! I'm readyy to be the last man standing

in the school-wide hide-and-seek hunt.

Vegas Strip?

You're just a little uh... "bright" is all.

Oh yeah, I want everyone to see me when I win.

This is going to make an awesome yearbook picture!

Well, they'll see you alright,

like you know, when you're "trying" to hide!

Oh, good point, ah, I just gotta win this thing.

I'm trying to change the conversation.

What conversation?

The one where I was voted most likely

to come to graduation in my pajamas.

Oh yeah, that was...Totally obvious.

Who wouldn't want to graduate in their pj's?

I want something in the yearbook that'll surprise people.

Winner of the great all-school hide-and-seek fits the bill!

Then... you gotta change that outfit.

What do ya' have in mind?

I don't know; you gotta blend in like,you know, animals do.

Hey, the SciGirls know all about using animal tricks

to make life easier for us humans.

You mean like that trick geckos do?

They can make their tails fall off when they're in mortal danger.

I would love to learn how to do that!

You are very, very odd.

So uh, SciGirls, save me again!

Lookin' for some animals here.

Oh, there we go.

Watch for the arrows! They'reclues

for the "Pick'M, Stick'M"game on the website.

[SciGirls] The Winter Carnival is a festival

that they hold in St. Paul

and they have a lot of ice sculptures and snow sculptures

and pine trees all over and it smells really good.Trees!

I'm Lizzie and the thing that I like about science

is the more you know about science,

the more you know about the world.

My friends are Carolyn and Elin

and we've been friends for a really long time.

The really good memories I have are with those guys.

You guys, let's go look at the ice sculptures.

Winter is one of my favorite seasons.

My name is Carolyn, and my favorite thing about science

is the biology; I just really like the animals, it's really fun.

Lizzie and Elin are of my best friends, and I just

love being around them and they love science too, so it's really nice.

Hey!

Whoa! I love penguins.

My name is Elin, and I really love

the mathematical aspects of science.

You can really see how it affects people in real life.

I was born and raised in Minnesota,

so I love cold.

I especially love all the different sports you can play

in winter, like skiing and ice-skating.

It's the middle of winter in Minnesota right now,

and there's a lot of ice and snow.

And that makes it sort of dangerous

for a lot of different people.

[Carolyn] It'd be really great if there was some way

to help people get more traction on the ice.

[Lizzie] My grandma slipped on the ice

and she broke her rib and her arm.

We really want to help people not slip and fall on the ice

because it's such a huge problem

for a lot of different people, especially elderly people.

Something all of our boots have in common is the treads,

but they just have treads in varying amounts.

Like mine don't have treads really at all.

I went into my closet and pulled out some boot covers

that my parents use to walk the dog.

[Elin] The idea with putting more on the front of your foot

is that you push off with the front of your foot to walk,

and so then to get good grip,

to be able to take like, more normal steps.

I figured it out. Success!

I think they would be easier to be used by the younger person,

like an adult, but for older people, it's not going to work very well.

A lot of the things right now in the market for nonslip footwear,

are either made for really intense use, and others,

they don't seem to work as well as maybe we'd like them to,

so we think that there's definitely a way

that we can improve our product.

So, we did some online research.

I think we should look up how polar bears grip the ice,

because polar bears live on the ice.

Its paws are perfect for getting around on the slick, cold surface.

Rough pads give it a nonslip grip.

And it talks about biomimicry right down here.

"Bio" is life and "mimicry" is like copying,

so it's life copying.

Biomimicry is taking ideas that you can see in nature

and then trying to incorporate that into things

that are really good for human use.

So maybe we could try and design something to grip it

based off of a polar bear or some other animal

that can grip things really well.

We would like to have an expert to work with,

and so we found this woman named Cindy Gilbert, she's

a biologist and she teaches a biomimicry design class.

We reached out to Cindy and we had a video chat with her,

and she said that she would help us come up with a solution for our problem.

We're going to start doing some research and looking at animals,

then Cindy is going to come,

and then we're going to research some animals together.

[thumb piano plays]

[Elin] We're at the Como Zoo, and we are figuring out

about different animals and how they are adapted

to walk and grip things.

♪ ♪

Look at the polar bear!

Oh, hey! Nice view. Yeah.

[Lizzie] Since polar bears have such big paws,

it can easily spread out the weight,

and create the snowshoe effect.

The snowshoe effect is where you have

a large amount of weight spread over a large area,

instead of concentrated on a small area.

♪ ♪

It's got really disproportionately big feet.

And this long tail.

[Carolyn] And then their paws are also really big.

[Elin] We looked at a lot of different animals

that all were adapted to living in cold weather.

Now we're going to meet our mentor, Cindy Gilbert,

and we're going to go to another zoo and check out more animals.

Hi, I'm Elizabeth;

this is my kitty, Scamper, and this is my math clock.

I like to collect money from around the world.

This is Sandy, who likes to play with lasers.

This is my wall of science stuff.

This is my award for being the biggest techie,

and these are most of the capitals of Europe.

And I wrote them all in my left hand,

because I'm practicing to be ambidextrous. Bye!

Hi! Great to meet you!

You too. Are you ready for a day at the zoo? [SciGirls] Yes!

Adaptation, talk about biomimicry?

Yeah. Alright, let's go. Awesome!

Wow, look at it swimming underwater!

It's like it's flying.

They have really thick feet.

They have sort of like hooked claws

on the backs of their feet too.

They actually have pretty long claws too,

don't they? They're very curved.

Yeah, they are really curvy; they're sharp.

Oh, look, over here.

Oh, it's hey, wow, he's right there. Look at his feet!

The claws look like they'd be really good for gripping things,

and like, digging and rooting around.

When we were at the zoo, we met with an educator,

and she showed us a ball python.

How do the snakes move on the ground?

[woman] The underside of the snake has much larger scales

compared to the back side.

And these larger scales work like a tread

to actually help them to grip onto something

and cause a little bit of a friction.

[Lizzie] The ones on the bottom are more like bands almost,

and they go all the way across.

[Elin] After we looked at some of the live animals, we looked at

these things called biological artifacts, or biofacts.

♪ ♪

It helped us get a really up-close look.

We could also sort of feel them

and see different adaptations the animals had.

[woman] This is a wolverine; their fur,

it resists frost building up on the fur.

They do have these big furry paws and they also have fur

that grows on the bottom of their feet

and gives them more traction in that way.

[Elin] It was interesting because you wouldn't really think of fur

to be something that would help animals grip,

but the wolverines do use it.

We're going to want to have some sort of coarse fur

that's on the bottom to help with traction.

One of the things that I found really interesting,

was you never really look at an animal's feet very much,

it's like seeing something you've always seen there,

but noticing something different about it.

[Elin] Looking at the biofacts really helped us understand

how exactly they work.

Do you want to come to MCAD,

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design where I work,

and do some designing?

Yeah, sure, that's great, let's do it tomorrow. Right!

Okay, you see how they're really looking at how the paws work?

We have to look at how camouflage works.

Check out this lizard.Where?

Exactly!

[Jake] Oh yeah, now I see him!

He matches the textures and colors of his surroundings.

So what's around you there?TTrees.

Great! Camouflage yourself as a tree.On it!

Wow, I gotta hand it to you Jake, you said

I wouldn't be able to tell it was you, and you're right!

You look like a tree!

Well thanks! [Izzie gasps]

Oh, wait a minute, I thought you were

Aw, we've got some work to do.

Hi girls, come on in to the design studio.

Oh wow, this stuff is cool!

This is the most fun part about design,

because this where we get to think really big

and you really want to make sure that you're considering

in your design our audience,

and our audience is the elderly population.

Let's just have fun and get to it, ready?

Yeah, okay. Alright, see you later. Okay, bye.

We can't have something be really difficult to be put on,

so that'll help us determine whether or not

we want something that is like, built into a boot.

What if we just had like, something that you could step into,

that would just like, you step down in a certain way

and then it clicks on?

Oh yeah,likeI know. Like skis. Yeah, cross-country skis.

It seems that most animals use claws

to grip into the snow and ice, so I was thinking of

maybe having little claws built into the rubber of the boot.

I think it should be good for ice and snow, because

you're more likely to have the combination than just one.

We should each make at least or designs

so we can work out the specifics afterwards.

♪ ♪

My design is loosely based off of a wolverine's paw.

It has claws on the bottom, where the weight is put more on,

so you're going to need more traction on those areas.

I kind of based it on how the bear paws work.

Each little toe finger thingy had like felt on it.

In the middle part, it's kind of like the snake's belly,

how they're like little shingles and stuff that kind of

move back and forth, so that you still have flexibility.

I was trying to incorporate the snowshoe effect with this,

where the whole base of it would be wider than what the boot would be.

I can't wait to see whatyour designs are all about!

[Elin] Each of us focused on either footpads or fur claws,

and that influenced how our designs really worked.

Well, I really like this idea of switching around

what animals actually do with their fur,

so we have the friction moving forward.

And I actually really love that idea of individual toes,

where we actually saw that in the zoo.

And I really like this idea of stepping in like a ski boot,

so that's a great idea too.

It was really nice to work with Cindy.

She had a lot of information about stuff, yet she let us

figure out stuff on our own, and I really liked that.

Okay, so the design school has a great box of materials

that we can look at to test, so why don't we go get that box

and test some of these materials out?

Yeah.Alright.Awesome.

Alright, here it is.

[Lizzie] Since there was so many different kinds of materials,

we decided to sort them between whether they were clawlike,

so that was most of the metal stuff,

or whether they were like a footpad, sort of the rubbery stuff,

or if they were like fur, which was cloth.

And we made some chicken wire frames.

On the bottom of those frames,

we put whatever we were going to test.

[Elin] We took Lizzie's boot and we filled it with a bag of sand,

so it would be sort of weighted, to make it more realistic.

[Lizzie] Then we had the boot inside the frame with the material on it.

Then we clipped the boot to a spring scale,

and we pulled it along a cookie sheet with ice on it.

...to see how much force it took to pull it across the ice.

[Carolyn] The first test is the Brillo pads.

We're pounds, ounces.

The materials that we're testing

are creating different amounts of friction

between the bottom of the boot cover and the ice.

That's why we're using pounds of force to measure it.

We did trials for each sample, and then we averaged them.

This one is like a cheese grater, and it's testing

for the fur that's smooth one way and hard the other.

Go.

That was , .

Go.

That was pounds, ounces.

I predict it will just slide along real easily.

pounds, ounces of force.

Grommets. Go.

I got pounds, ounces of force.

[loud scraping]

pounds, ounces of force.

This is the death m*rder*r thing.

Nine, two.

Six, fifteen.

When we designed our test, we first thought

that maybe it was just more friction was better,

but we really noticed this with the connector plates,

maybe there was a point at which there was too much friction.

The tires, it's meant to represent the pads on the feet.

I saw pound, ounces of force.

Now that we're done with our testing,

we're going back to Carolyn's

to analyze and graph the data that we got.

Hey everybody, I'm Carolyn; this is my puppy Otto.

This is my dad and this is my sibling, Mike.

This is Lake Nokomis, that's the City of Minneapolis.

And there's where I like to sit-- in that tree.

Ta-da! I'm up in the tree.

♪ ♪

My dog can do a few tricks so I'm going to show you guys.

Roll over. No, you don't know roll over, do you?

Well, bye everybody!

♪ ♪

[Lizzie] When we were making our graph, we laid them out

by the amount of pounds of force that it took to move them,

starting from the least and going to the most.

We also gave each a card with a color on it,

to tell if it was maybe a fur or a claw or a footpad,

so that we could tell where the different things stood.

It seems to me the claws

definitely had the most amount of friction,

The footpads are really in the middle of the friction scale,

then fur things sort ofdefinitely had the least amount of friction.

With the exception of corduroy.

You wouldn't think that a fabric

would have so much traction on the ice, but it really did.

It had, I think it was the second or third

most traction out of all the materials.

I think we can say that even though there's some outlayers,

by general rule, there's more friction

between the claws and the ice, than there is

between like fur and ice or footpads and ice.

Then there's the least amount of friction between the fur

and the ice, and footpads are right in the middle.

Alright, let's get to building.

♪ ♪

[Carolyn] So we took our designs and we used these cutouts

that we had made of this rubber material.

We used it as a base, and we cut out other materials

and put them on there.

[Erin] We're using all this stuff, all the research that we've gained

from all of the days at the zoo and at MCAD

and now we're applying it to real life.

And it's going to be awesome!

[Carolyn] Lizzie used the car mats stuff, with those little grommets.

Elin used the metal finishing pads

for like, little toes and footpads

and I used more the grommets to grip in the front and the back.

[Elin] We need some way to test 'em.

Maybe we should get our friends and family together

and like, have some sort of ice rink party or something,

and then we could have them all walk out on the ice

and test all of our ideas and see, like maybe take a survey

and see which ones they like best.

Do you guys like that idea? Yeah.

This is my dog Shen Yun.

She's actually sleeping right now;

she's very tired. Say hi.

I really like to draw anime, which are like Japanese comics.

These are some of the ones that I've drawn.

And I really like to read.

Well, that's about all there is, bye!

Okay, this is going to be an awesome party you guys.

Today we're going to be going to the Depot,

which is an ice rink in Minneapolis,

and we will be debuting our boot cover prototypes

to our family and friends.

A prototype debut party, that will make it sound really fancy.

Yes, because we are fancy.

We'll be taking a survey and seeing

how people predict that they'll work,

then how they actually work when we test them out on the ice.

Our goal is to make this a blind test, which means

that there's no bias because no one knows whose is whose.

Welcome everybody to our prototype debut party!

We're going to introduce our problem,

and then we'll talk about biomimicry,

to give them an idea of what we've been doing.

Then we'll show them all of the solutions that we've come up with.

We have these, this steel wool here,

represents a footpad of an animal.

We also have these like, rubber car mats.

[Lizzie] We couldn't decide if it was going to be a footpad or a fur,

because it sort of, it has qualities of both.

[Carolyn] And then we have claws, which are the grommets.

Based it on the claws of like, the polar bears.

These two designs use corduroy on them.

The wolverine fur kind of thing going.

Which design do you all predict that the testers

will feel the most stable in, A, B, and C?

People will predict how they think designs will work

based on what we've talked about.

So the results of that preliminary test

is that A had votes,

B had votes, and C had votes as well.

Most of the people thought that boot cover B

was going to work the best, but it was by a small margin.

♪ ♪

What we want you to do is each take steps, yup, in the boot,

and we're going to have you guys switch shoes, so that you can

try out every single, yeah, or at least try out .

You guys are filling out a survey by the way.

So really keep in mind which one is which and how they feel.

[Carolyn] The first people to test them out are these people.

We haven't even tested them ourselves,

and it's really scary,

'cause I don't know how everything's going to work.

It felt like it was really gripping the ground.

They felt better, but I was still slipping a little.

Alright, let's take off the shoes and switch 'em around.

The toes are falling off too. Oh and your toes fell off.

Yeah, and the toes are falling off. The toes are falling off.

I think we'll survive this.

After that, things started to fall off more.

We found these on the ice; they fell off this shoe.

Everything's falling off. Toe, oh no.

Stuff is falling. It's bad. Everything's falling off.

It's kind of embarrassing.

We have spent so much time on this

and all these people are like, this is so exciting,

I really hope this will work, and then it doesn't.

[woman] You need to test your adhesives before you do a prototype.

Things were just falling off every which way

and we had to have a jar to keep track of all the pieces.

I can speak for all of us when I say we feel

a little bit frustrated, a little bit discouraged,

because this is really going to skew our results.

I'm not really sure what we're going to do.

[boy] Everything's falling off.

[Carolyn] It felt really frustrating.

we just kind of tried to work with what we had.

Because we didn't have any glue to provide a more permanent fix,

we just used tape as a temporary fix.

Walking and I'm following behind you people, picking up things.

[Lizzie] Tape really wasn't working.

We decided that we weren't going to do any more testing.

We're not going to be doing any more official testing.

There won't be any more surveys, but people who want to try out

will still be able to try them out just to see how they work.

The nice part about these is that they give me traction,

but that they aren't stuck on the ice.

[Lizzie] Do you think you're more stable or less stable?

I guess I feel more stable.

I think if it had worked,

we wouldn't have quite as in-depth information,

because we had people telling us what they thought

rather than what we wanted them to answer questions about.

I'm really impressed how

you're using science to make

life better for people

and for people like grandpa and me.

It felt really good to be supported by all our friends

and family, and we could share this with them.

Thank you all for coming.

[cheers & applause]

Thank you.

♪ ♪

[Carolyn] I'm really excited to see

what the surveys tell us about everything.

We are analyzing the results from our prototype testing,

and we are figuring out that most of the time

they liked option A the best.

[Lizzie] If A is the winner, why do you think that people

felt the most stable in them?

[Erin] I think it might be because of all these little grippy things.

We talked about why some things worked better than other things

and then we took that information and combined it

with what the people said on the surveys.

Let's upload our project to the SciGirls website?

[Erin] Even though our data was flawed

because of the adhesive issues we had, we still got

a lot of relevant information because people did say

that the individual grips really did help them walk.

Alright, so we're going to submit it? Yes. Yea!

We did a video chat with Cindy

to talk about what had happened in the tests. Hi. Hello.

Did you have a great time at the ice rink?

Yeah. Well we had some issues at the ice rink.

The glue that we were using when we tested the prototypes failed.

And also it kind of lost the footpad and all of its grommets.

What would be your next step?

Use better glue and then test the prototypes ourselves.

And we're just going to see how we feel they compare.

[Cindy] Yeah, that's a really great idea.

I know that it probably was really frustrating

when you were testing out your prototypes, things

were falling off and whatnot, but I want to reassure you

that that is actually very normal

and the beginning stages of prototyping is the reason why

it takes anywhere from months to years

to take a prototype to an existing product

that gets user-tested over and over and over again.

So pat yourself on the back, you did a great job,

and you'll do the testing again.

I just really want to thank you for all the things

that you've done for us. We all want to.

[Lizzie] It was really, really great to work with you.

And you've been really invaluable to us as a resource.

Well you're so welcome; it's been a real pleasure.

All of you are really fantastic scientists,

and I look forward to seeing you again in the future.

Alright, bye Cindy. Bye. Bye.

♪ ♪

[Elin] We're at the ice rink in St. Paul right now,

after rebuilding our boot covers.

We get to test them out.

♪ ♪

Really good! I'm leaving grooves in the ice;

they actually work really well.

They're really cool; I like 'em!

They all worked really well; you can tell like

when people were walking, they walked really naturally,

like you weren't even on the ice.

So I think that, it was really great.

It's really nice to see everything go from

just an idea and to actually testing it and finding out

what other people thought about them.

I am absolutelyproud of the work that we've been doing.

The thing that I really like about biomimicry

is the fact that we have all these problems,

and nature has already made ways to solve them, like

which animal has the answers,

then kind of switch them around so that we can use them.

Bask in my awesomeness!

I think working on this biomimicry project with all my friends

was a lot of fun because it was really interesting to learn

all about biomimicry and I know Lizzie and Carolyn so well.

It made it all the more fun to be able to work with them.

Got your clues? Head on over to the Web and play

"Pick'M, Stick'M" at pbskidsgo.org.

Jake, Jake, you did it! You're the winner!

No way! Thanks Izzie.

And animals for thinking of this whole camouflage thing.

And SciGirls for reminding us to use lots of glue.

Oh yeah, they rock! I can see my yearbook picture now.

"Jake, the greatest champion of all time!"

For the first time in my life, I'm going to look cool.

Yeah, you really are...

as long as you don't have a bird on your head!

Shoo! Go away! Shoo!

Smile for the yearbook!

[shutter click]

[Izzie chuckles] Not the picture I was imagining.

Oh maybe next year you can go

for most improved yearbook picture.