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The ACS tent at the Fair is located in the Conservation World section of the Fair.

In 2022 the weather was reasonably moderate; not to hot and not much rain. We continued to have our hands-on activities for the kids in an expanded area in the tent and our demonstrations moved to our front lawn with plastic-wrapped hay bales for seating. The national ACS meeting was in Chicago starting the second weekend of the Fair, so we received permission to close our tent a couple days early so our members could attend the Chicago ACS meeting.

Since 2019, we have had a three-foot by three-foot by three-foot Soma Cube out of heavy cardboard boxes painted bright colors, and set it on the lawn in front of our tent whenever the weather permitted.  It has proven very popular with kids of all ages (yes, including some moms and dads) as they tried to assemble the seven pieces into a cube or whatever other design moved their spirit.  It's also been great fun watching many of our visitors approach the puzzle and try their hand at solving it.

The demonstrations and hands-on experiments have proved to be very popular, and we continue to add new experiments in both categories each year.  Our expanded hands-on area makes it easier to accomodate the large number of kids who consider this their favorite attraction in our tent.  We handed out packets of information and educational resources to all teachers that came to our tent and identify themselves.  We have a new design the last two years for the very popular bags we hand out to our visitors. 

Check out the photos from:   2004,   2005,   2006,   2007,   2008,   2009,   2010,   2011,   2012,   2013,   2014,   2015   2016  2017  2018  2019  2021  2022

Here is the daily tally of the number of visitors to our booth for each year. In total we have greeted over 200,000 visitors between 2004 and 2022!

*   Extensive storms caused Conservation World to close early.
** Tornados in the area and high winds caused extensive damage to nearby tents and a mid-afternoon closing of Conservation World.
*** We closed the tent after Friday because of committments of our members to a chemistry conference.
⁺   Storms caused Conservation World to close for a while, then storms passed and we re-opened.
^‡    In 2012 we moved from our dirt-floor tent to the concrete slab in the south end of the "Discovery Tent", right next door to our previous location.  In 2016 we moved to a dirt-floor tent across from the previous location and down from the walkway a bit.
      In 2021 the world was trying to recover from COVID-19, and this definitely affected the attendance in our tent, as well as at the rest of the Fair.
      In 2022 we closed two days early so our members could attend the national ACS meeting in Chicago.