(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.
So glad Obama was president then.