 Hi everyone, my name is Ruben and I am a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library. For today's STEM challenge, I'm going to show you how to make spongy chia pets. Before we get started, do we all know what STEM means? STEM is an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. So what makes spongy chia pets a STEM project? Well, the study of plants called botany is a branch of biology that deals with plant structure, plant properties, and biochemical processes. In making spongy chia pets, you will get to see before your eyes how light, water, air, nutrients, and proper temperature contribute to plant growth. Typically, the nutrients in a plant come from the soil, but with this project, you will see how plants can grow without soil. So let's get started. For this project, we are going to need a spray bottle. We're going to need some water. I put mine in a dish, but that's not necessary. You can use your sink if you need. We have a clamshell container. Any container, especially one that can close and fit your sponge would work. We have a sponge. As you'll see, we have kind of a large one here. And then we have some chia seeds. All right, so a bit about seeds. Seeds, even the tiniest ones, contain all the food and the instructions necessary to sprout a new plant. The plant depends on the energy stored within the seed to grow. As the seed soaks up the water, its food stored inside begins to be converted into energy in the form of enzymes. The enzymes trigger the seed to send out roots and germinate. The roots break out of the hard protective outer layer of the seed called the seed coat. They grow downwards and begin to anchor the plant and absorb water and nutrients. Next, the seed begins to grow a stem, a process called germination. Once germination takes place, the plant grows, eventually making its own food from the nutrients it takes from the soil and through photosynthesis. So here is how we are going to make our spongy chia pet. Okay, first thing we're going to do, we are going to take our sponge and we are going to dip it into our water. We want to soak that sponge, make sure it gets full and we're going to wring it out. So we want our sponge to be damp, we don't necessarily want it to be drippy. Okay, so we've got our damp sponge and now we are going to stick it into our clamshell container. We have one side that's a little deeper than the other, so we're going to put it in the deep side. All right, the next thing we're going to do is we are going to take our chia seeds and we are going to sprinkle them onto the top of the sponge just like this. You can go fast, you can go slow, I go a little slowly so I don't drop a lot of seeds, but if you drop seeds over the side, that's okay. All right, so now that we have our seeds on the sponge, we are going to start pressing them in to the sponge. There's little holes in your sponge and that's where we want to make sure the seeds go. So you can also kind of rub them in, massage them in, make sure they get in there. I think that looks pretty good. I'll just stick with that for now and shake the seeds off my fingers here. And then the next thing you're going to do, you are going to grab your bottle of water, your spray bottle, and you are going to spray it on top of the sponge, on the seeds. So when you're growing your chia pet, you want to make sure that your seeds never dry out. So you're going to be doing this pretty regularly, definitely every day. Okay, and once you've done that and your seeds are all damp, set this bottle back down and then you will cover your pet just in the evening. So you can leave it open most of the day and be sure to spray it to keep your seeds damp, but at night you're going to want to cover it. And when you do that, you're creating kind of a little greenhouse here and that's going to help your chia pet grow. It's going to take a little while for your chia pet to grow, but after a while it's going to look like this. As your spongy chia pet is growing, observe how long does it take for your chia pet to grow? How much water did you use in order to grow it? How long did your chia pet sprouts grow? Did some seeds sprout? Did some seeds not? Why do you think that happened? You can measure all of these observations and keep track of them as your chia pet is growing. It's awesome food for thought and I want to thank you all for joining me today, and I hope to see you for the next STEM challenge. Thank you very much.