If you ask 7-year-old Ava Brown which came first, the chicken or the egg, she will tell you it really doesn’t matter, then she will detail the life cycle of a chicken, starting with fertilization and continuing with a chick hatching from an egg.
It’s just the way Ava rolls: She’s serious about pursuing science, she loves to explain what she knows, and she possesses a fun sense of adventure in doing both. Such traits show up in spades on the Tigard girl’s new YouTube channel, “Ava’s Lab Adventures.”
On the topic of eggs, Ava learned about a chicken’s life cycle as a second-grader at Charles F. Tigard Elementary School and advanced her interest in one of her YouTube experiments.
Ava used several eggs in an experiment titled “Can Ava Save the Egg?! (Epic Egg Drop Challenge!).” In the six-minute video, she variously tries to equip eggs to stay intact in drops from the mezzanine upstairs of her family home—by enclosing one inside a tiny house made of straws, swaddling one with cotton balls and tape and tying the result to six balloons, and encasing another with bubble wrap closed into a box.
All three eggs “survive”—Ava’s word—the fall. “Three for three! And I can eat all these for breakfast!” Ava intones while mugging with funny facial expressions and bodily poses.
Ava’s mother, Eliana, traces her daughter’s scientific interest to gifts of science-experiment kits that an uncle and her parents have given her.
“She’s just excited to see what happens,” the mother says. “She loves to learn.”
To more broadly share her enthusiasm and undertake a partnership between mother and daughter, Eliana and Ava launched the YouTube channel in September. So far, they have put up a dozen or so episodes and gathered a following of 45 subscribers.
“It’s great to see a kid teach other kids,” Eliana said.
Some viewers of each video have left comments. After the egg trial, one viewer remarked: “I did not think the cotton and balloons would survive. I was wrong. But that looked like fun!”
It was never far-fetched for Ava to be able to exhibit her delight in science on a YouTube channel, as Eliana has a job working to support an established YouTuber based in Beaverton, Jimmy Briggs. His “World According to Briggs” channel, which has amassed 1.35 million subscribers, typically presents research for top-10 lists, such as “America’s Best-Kept Secrets: 15 Small Towns Under the Radar.” Eliana, a Mexican American, manages Briggs’ Spanish-language channel.
In connection with Eliana’s work for Briggs, she has acquired the camera, lighting and sound equipment as well as the editing software and know-how to distill each of her daughter’s experiments and accompany them with lively illustrations, graphics, color and effects.
For Ava’s YouTube channel, Eliana acts as partner-producer.
The Browns draw their experiments from books and websites. Ava stars in all episodes, though Eliana and her 2-year-old sister, Emilia, make appearances. After each experiment, Ava’s mom takes a couple of days to slice and dice raw video recordings into episodes.
Two other episode titles have included:
“I made elephant toothpaste explode!,” ending with Ava remarking, “I told you it’s going to be messy!”
“COLORED Ice? How? Easy!,” which led Ava to nudge ice cubes of varying colors into “ice skating” around a plate, leaving new, combined colors in their wakes.
Not all experiments work out. An experiment to use four lemons each pierced by a penny and a nail and wired together to illuminate an LED light remained in the dark. In comic-book lettering, the episode title declares, “Lemon power. Fail!”
Ava narrates: “So it looks like this didn’t work for me, but it might work for you! It’s OK if it doesn’t work. We will do this video again. We will try again with this video. Tell me if it works for YOOOOUUU!”
Depending on the specifics of each episode, Ava squarely addresses the value of safety. Her main caution is simple: “Safety before science!” She also reminds her audiences to conduct experiments in the company of a parent.
Eliana said she and Ava have no prescribed intentions about what to do with Ava’s YouTube channel long term–whether they will try to build a bigger audience, whether Ava’s interest in science will endure or whether the channel could ever generate money.
For now, Eliana mainly considers the project an opportunity for her and her daughter to enjoy each other in a fun way to channel Ava’s curiosity and delight in science.
“I told her that as long as she’s enjoying this, we’ll continue,” Eliana said. “We’re going to see where it goes.”
To view episodes of Ava Brown’s YouTube science channel, go to youtube.com/@Ava_G_49
