Camp CrunchLabs: Velcro Suit Challenges & Engineering Fun

Welcome to CrunchLabs Space Camp

• 🚀 Mark Rober introduces the third annual Camp CrunchLabs, which has transformed into a Space Camp visiting a new planet or moon each week.
• 🪐 This week, they are on Mercury, the closest and smallest planet, highlighting its extreme temperatures and rapid orbital period.
• 💡 The camp features weekly videos with guest stars and engaging home challenges designed to foster creativity and engineering skills.

How Camp CrunchLabs Works

• ✅ Participants can join various challenges, with the best entries earning a CrunchLabs badge and a chance to win a Platinum Ticket for a studio destruction event.
• 📦 Weekly build boxes are delivered, containing fun, hands-on STEM toys like a trampoline ball launcher or a wrist-mounted paper airplane launcher.
• 🧠 Each build box comes with a step-by-step video guide from Mark Rober, teaching fundamental engineering principles and smart skills.

The Power of Velcro

• 🤝 Guest Pierson and Mark's nephews join the first space camp episode, where they explore the properties of Velcro.
• 💪 They conduct a demonstration revealing Velcro's surprising strength, showing it can hold over 61 pounds of weight.
• 🛰️ The discussion highlights Velcro's natural inspiration (burrs) and its practical utility in zero-gravity environments, such as securing items on the International Space Station.

Velcro Olympics Challenges

• 🏅 Teams compete in four Velcro-themed events to test their agility and sticking power.
• 🎯 Challenges include a Velcro ball toss (sticking balls to a suit), a Velcro removal race against the clock, and a challenging Velcro obstacle course.
• 🤸 The final event is a Velcro wall jump, where participants leap from a trampoline to stick as high as possible on a large Velcro wall.

Home Challenge: Forced Perspective

• 📸 The first home challenge for campers is to create a forced perspective photo or video.
• 🖼️ This creative task involves strategically placing the camera and objects to distort scale and make items appear much larger or smaller than they are.
• 🏆 Submissions are due within five days, with the top four entries having the opportunity to win a Platinum Ticket and be featured in a future episode.