(bright music)
(laughter)
- I definitely look up to my sister.
She has a lot of great things that I can learn from
and I think she's an awesome older sister.
- Ow.
Thank you, meimei.
Kimberly is my best friend.
She's never going to be replaced.
- [Kimberly] I like to do martial arts
and then I also like to do basketball.
- I like to do archery
and play piano.
I have a lot of favorite subjects.
I like math, and English,
and social studies, and science and technology.
- I like technology the best.
These are some of the programs that I did,
but I also really like science.
- I like challenges.
We saw some videos
of people doing weather balloon launches online.
- We thought that it would be a really fun
family project to do.
(bright music)
- [Rebecca] A weather balloon is basically
just a very large balloon.
- They're used to see what the weather is going to be.
- So they send up different instruments attached
to the bottom of the weather balloons.
- And they'll transmit the data and say,
"Oh it's gonna be partly cloudy."
- There are 16,000 weather balloons launched every day
around the world.
The weather companies, the forecasters
only recover 30 percent of them.
The other 70 percent.
- Are still floating in space.
- No they're not.
- Well.
- They're still somewhere.
- They're somewhere in the air.
- Try not to interrupt me.
(bright music)
- [Kimberly] This is our Loki Lego Launcher.
The first spacecraft in the Yeungstuff Space Program.
- For the first launch, we didn't really have a goal.
- We just wanted to get it off the ground.
We didn't really understand as much science then.
We were kind of just letting go of it hoping
that it went well.
- The calculations were right.
- We call it the Loki Lego Launcher because Loki is our cat.
Our flight computer keeps track of a number of things,
including altitude, latitude, longitude, speed,
temperature, pressure, voltage, current and power.
There is a lot of data that we can learn from.
- The first launch went to 78,000 feet.
The images were awesome.
When we first saw them we screamed.
It's just the blackness of space
and then there's Loki sitting there in the middle of it
right on the horizon.
(bright music)
The first media that kind of wrote an article about us
was a local tech news website called The Geekwire
and then someone from the Washington Post saw it
and so they wrote an article about it
and then other people saw it
and they wrote articles about it.
- [Man] You're going to have
to bring the Loki Lego Launcher.
- No, no, no way!
Seriously?
- [Man] You're going to meet the president.
- Our parents told us that we were going
to the White House science fair.
(bright music)
(applause)
- Well hello everybody.
Welcome to the White House.
- When he actually walked through the doors,
we were all in complete awe and admiration.
- Hey guys.
- [Rebecca] Because this is President Obama.
- He was really easy to talk to
and he was really friendly.
- What do you guys have?
- So we built a spacecraft called the Loki Lego Launcher
and we sent it up to 78,000 feet.
- [President Obama] That's crazy.
- He talks to all of these famous world leaders
and makes decisions that affect the fate of our country
and we're just 9 and 11 year old girls
who did a science project.
This is a rough drawing of the flight computer
and we'll probably put the VI sensor here.
(bright music)
I am making some changes to our original design
because we're adding some new components
and taking off some.
- On the second launch we added a bigger balloon
because we wanted it to go higher
and we also wanted it to go faster.
We added an APRS radio tracker which sent us location
and altitude data in almost real time.
- However, the APRS might not be very accurate
at ground level, so having the GPS unit as well
is very helpful.
We rewired the voltage/current/power sensor so it would
connect to a solar panel that we installed on our spacecraft
to measure how much current it was getting from the sun
and we had a hypothesis that as our spacecraft went higher,
we would have more solar current because we thought
that since there's less particles in the air
it wouldn't block the sun's rays.
(drill buzzing)
The last thing that we changed was our Lego minifigure.
We thought she would be a good role model
because she's a girl who's strong and she's brave
and she doesn't give up even when things are hard.
(bright music)
- [Kimberly] Soon, it was time for launch.
- 3,2,1
Lift off!
(bright music)
- We couldn't believe that it actually went 101,000 feet.
I think we screamed again.
(screaming)
- Our current data was really interesting
because our solar panel was producing more current
as the altitude was going up
which indicated that our hypothesis was correct.
- Getting something correct,
especially when you don't know that much about the subject,
always feels good.
I hope that more kids, especially girls,
follow paths and do projects like ours in STEM
and I hope that our projects teach them
that they can do whatever they want
if they put their heart into it.
- They don't have to stick with whatever is girly or boyish.
Girls are awesome and girls can do anything.