High school students - would you like to find out how you score on the SAT?  Take a full length practice SAT test, proctored by Princeton Review.  This is a great opportunity to try your hand at the types of questions you will see on the actual test.

 There will be SAT practice test administered on Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 1:30 PM until 6:00 PM (tentatively) at Berryessa Branch Library. Please register by calling 1-408-808-3050 or come directly to the information desk.

You do not need to print an admission ticket, but must bring a couple of pencils and a calculator to the test. Check out this SAT Day Checklist to get prepared for the test.

Come back on Wednesday, May 29, 2013 at 5:30 pm for the strategy session to receive a personalized score report.  Parents are welcome to attend the strategy session.

It was in the news - massive, the size of 15-story office building, asteroid DA14 nearly brushed the surface of the Earth on February 14th, 2013. Almost at the same time another meteorite (or meteoroid) unexpectedly exploded over Russia's Ural region. About 1,200 people, 200 of them children, were injured mostly by glass that exploded into schools and workplaces. Meteoroids typically cause sonic booms when they enter  the Earth's atmosphere and the one over Russia shattered windows, TVs and dishes in peoples's homes. Large asteroids reflect the light of the sun, so it is easy to see them and small objects like the one that exploded over Ural are difficult to trace. Meteoroids are usually pieces of matter that have splintered off from asteroids. A meteorite is a meteoroid that reaches the surface of the Earth without being completely vaporized . To find out more about these mysteriously dangerous space objects come to the library and explore all our materials from books (digital and printed) to DVDs.

 Here are some titles from our collections:

 Adult materials:

        Comets, Meteors and Asteroids by John Man 

        Cosmic collisions [videorecording] : our explosive universe

        Asteroids [videorecording] : deadly impact  

Children's books:

        Asteroids by Derek Zobel

        Comets and Asteroids by E.M. Hans

        Jupiter and the Asteroids and the rest of Explore the solar system series books 

Berryessa Branch Library is offering afterschool math homework tutoring sessions on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 3:00 till 5:00 p.m. weekly. An experienced volunteer tutor Susan Chang helps  school age children (K-12 grades level) to better understand math concepts and teaches problem solving, while helping children with their homework in a nice and friendly manner. No registration required. 

New OneInMath session for children in K-2 grades will be resuming at Berryessa and Evergreen SJPL branches in January, 2013.

Our wonderful volunteer Urvi Gupta, who is currently a junior at Harker School, trained  a group of Evergreen and Berryessa area high school students to help her to conduct this program in both branch libraries.

The program teaches the kids to master simple addition and subtraction skills that will help them to succeed in math and science classes later on. Face-to-face tutoring and video instructions will be provided.

To register for the session, please go to OneInMath online web page. Classes will be conducted weekly on  Saturdays, starting 1/19  at Berryessa and weekly on Tuesdays, starting 1/15 at Evergreen.

Imagine a future, when at home your computer is connected to a printer that can print a solid object - a new part for your car or a toy for your child. Actually 3D printers have been in development for over two decades and lots of commercial 3D printers are now available from different companies such as 3D Systems.

3D printing is an additive technology in which objects are built up in layers in a process that mat take several hours. There are different techniques of doing this. Some of them are: stereolithography, fused deposition modeling (FDM), Polyjet Matrix and selective laser sintering (SLS).

For home use a growing range of kits and printers are also now available as well as pre-assembled personal hardware such as Up! Personal Portable 3D Printer.

If you would like to learn more about this wonder, there are several sources available in our library collection:

• Beginning Google SketchUp for 3D printing [electronic resource] / Sandeep Singh 
• Printing in plastic [electronic resource] : build your own 3D printer / Patrick Hood-Daniel, James Floyd Kelly.  
• Makers : the new industrial revolution / Chris Anderson. 

Using SJPL new Encore library catalog you can now search not only for books and other library items,

but also for news and answers to your research questions. Encore provides an access to variety of articles from Ebsco Academic Search Complete databases along with information on books and media that library has.

NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars on August 6th. Using Google you can search for a nice NASA's video of this landing:

But you can also search for news on this mission using Encore's key words search: Curiosity rover, mars, NASA. This way you will be able to view full text of almost 30 articles on this topic as well as an article from New York Times by Kenneth Chang - Curiosity Rover Lands Safely On Mars, published on exact date when mission has been accomplished.  Curiosity ROver LAnds safely on AMrspublished on August 6th