al-mofhariz

Sometimes, science is all about experiments.  Sometimes it is not...case in point:  Space!  Scientists who want to learn about the planets and moons in our solar system and beyond have to rely on new and exiting methods of exploration. So how do space scientists make conclusions about objects in space?  They use models... One model is to visualize the size of something.  We started by visualizing a sphere we could hold, then a sphere the size of the room, then the sphere the size of the school, then a sphere the size of our town.  Visualizing is like making a model in your mind. Another model used is a globe model .  Scientists and students can use the globe model to recreate rotation as well as revolution around the sun.  Having the students manipulate the globe allows them to experience rotation as well as revolution - two difficult concepts. The third model we have been talking about is a model of the planet's surface .  Right now, the Mar...

From the Franklin Institute's General Report on the Explosions of Steam-Boilers     One of the many pleasures of writing "Tocqueville's Ghost" for HSNS ( discussed on AmericanScience here ) was revisiting Ann Johnson's  “Material Experiments: Environment and Engineering Institutions in the Early American Republic,” from Osiris  in 2009. It's a fascinating essay and makes a convincing case for rethinking the sort of science and engineering going on at West Point and in the Corps of Engineers in the early nineteenth century. Johnson shows how the West Point/Corps project adapted the French Polytechnique model in research as well as teaching, creating in the process a very productive "research school." She shows how prominent men of science like Alexander Dallas Bache carried on later celebrated work (most prominently his steam-boiler experiments, above) that owed much to their time working with Joseph Totten and the Corps of Engineers at Fort Adams. ...

Last week we finished up with our group experiments.  The students were able to pick a constant and change a variable.  The results were interesting....some went off really well while others caused no reaction. For now, we are leaving this inquiry unit to move into a new phase...exploring space!  I am hoping to come back and explore mentos throughout the year with a few new toys educational products from Steve Spangler .  Have you seen??? The Geyser Rocket car?  How much fun would that be to test and explore???  I am thinking of bringing this back when we do force and motion later this year...It is only $24.95. The next product that I love is the depth charger.  He has created a way to drop other substances into your soda...like baking powder, rock salt, etc... Make sure you check with your county guidelines first and always use safety goggles. This sells for $9.95. Finally, there is a new cap to screw on the geyser tube to see if the shape of the...

" After a week of great posts by my colleagues, I give you a bit of fluff, a Flickr account dedicated to "Science and Tech Ads" from the 1950's and 1960's. An informal pass through the materials finds ads mostly for science-intensive technology firms, but the page should suit the fancy of most historians of science and technology, especially those interested in the Cold War. Plenty of military imagery there. And a cool breeze of existential horror blows through the lot. Link

For some time now, historians of science--including those who transformed the field with their carefully wrought, local, micro-studies--have been lamenting the lack grand narratives. Nevertheless graduate students continue to be trained to drill deep, sacrificing breadth for depth. And even if and when junior scholars contemplate "going big," they find precious few examples to follow. Writing stories that transcend a single community, idea or even place, involves thinking differently about sources and about audience. Big histories also require the historian to think differently about herself and her relations to other scholars, those whose local stories have slowly carved out the vast canyon that becomes recognized as a national treasure. I'm suggesting that the best big histories make visible the canyon and the river, they reinterpret the accretion of "small" but powerful studies without which such sweeping narratives cannot be well told. This kind of metaphori...

We love our mentos experiments and it is a great opportunity to teach the difference between variable and constants.  However, we also need to make sure we teach about safety while we are experimenting. Our students favorite part of the mentos unit is when they get to work as a team to create their own combinations to test.  We tell them that they must have a constant - either the soda, the tube, the number of mentos or mentos themselves. Then they can choose the variable to change... Kids want to try out everything! I had requests for baking soda, rubbing alcohol, rock salt, pop rocks, skittles, etc...  Somethings I knew were fine and some things I needed to check with my supervisor first.  She made sure that I knew that the students should NOT be mixing unknown materials with a liquid without extensive safety lessons.  Well, I did not want to encourage anything dangerous...so I had to limit some of their choices.  Most groups tested different sodas, ment...

Today the students walked in and saw this on the science table. By the way that is a picture of me and one of my colleagues (Heather Howe) with Steve Spangler.  This sets up the excitement for scienc today! Today we are teaching about variables and constants.   What better way, right??? So we teach them that we will keep the # of mentos the same (constant) and we will change the type of soda (variable).  These are some of the sodas that the children chose to experiement with yesterday in their exit tickets. So again, we traipse on down to the black top and we let 'er rip! Again we discuss the changes as well as the similarities before going back into the school to record our data.    But now...we start comparing the two types of soda and noticing what happens when we change a variable...       Since we are still at the beginning of the year, my feedback was short and sweet...To find out more about this unit and get the detailed lesson plans and pr...

As many of you know, the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS) anchors an increasingly rich array of HPS offerings—talks, conferences, fellowships, and even a blog —on offer in Philly. They've got events almost every day of the week, drawn together from institutions spread up and down the Delaware. In about a fortnight, PACHS is hosting its 2012 Introductory Symposium. This is a chance for scholars from around the area to present brief synopses of their current projects. It should provide a great cross-section of current work in HPS, much of which ( by the looks of the program ) falls within the purview of AmericanScience. There are projects spanning from the colonial period, through the Early Republic, the Gilded Age, and across the twentieth century. Lots of comparative work, tons of connections between science and politics, agriculture, and industry, and even a tiny bit on the scientific method.  The all-day event is being held on Friday, September 28th, a...

If you are like me, you have been following the Chicago Teacher's strike over the past week.  Last Friday, it seemed as though the labor dispute was about to be resolved and schools would re-open on Monday, but that turned out to be wrong.  Union delegates met on Sunday and voted against the city's proposed contract and it now looks like the strike will continue until Wednesday at least. A close friend of mine belongs to the Chicago Teachers Union.  I've been struck by how different her take on the situation is from the one we get in the local and national media.  Over the weekend, for example, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial under the headline Don't Cave, Mr. Mayor whose opening paragraph read: "Over the weekend, Chicago Public Schools leaders offered teachers a sweet deal that would make most workers in the city envious. Teachers stood to reap a remarkably generous 16 percent raise over four years in a new contract. Guaranteed." Despite the fact th...

Boy oh boy do I love this lesson every year!  It is so much fun for both the students and the adults!  Most everyone has watched a youtube clip on this one. They know it's going to explode soda all over the place.  So instead of saying what do you think will happen, we focus on observing what does happen. If you haven't seen the clip...go watch it! Show it to your kids too... they love it!  This is the original Steve Spangler clip. Focus Question : What will you notice when we mix diet coke and mentos? Then we take the kids down to the black top where they can watch two demonstrations. We set up the guidelines first so that they are expecting it and they don't run and scream when it happens! It is super cool! When it is done we do it a second time and discuss what we hear, what we saw, how high does it go, what direction does it explode in, how much soda is left,  what do we wonder next.... Then we return to the room where we write this up in our notebooks. By t...

Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences  recently gave me the opportunity to review three thought-provoking books and in the process muse on the history of "American science." You can read the entire essay here . I had a great deal of fun writing this essay, especially because it gave me an excuse to think about of the earliest figures in the field. For instance: When Shryock and Schlesinger turned to science, they asked with Tocqueville: is there something distinctive about American science? Looking for American distinctiveness was part of their larger project, which multiplied exceptionalisms in the wake of the U.S.’s rise to superpower status. After the atomic bomb—Schlesinger called it “this terrible engine of destruction”—understanding American science mattered even more. Shryock recast and refined Tocqueville’s laments, explaining that industrial society lay behind the dearth of “pure” science in the United States. Shryock had reform in mind: “one ...

I am linking up with the Clutter Free Classroom to share how we set up our notebooks this week in my classroom! Do you teach your children what goes in your science notebook ?  This year we added a page to our journal to show what it would look like to set up our notebook.  First...we all glued down our table of contents .  This is a form that shows what we are teaching during the year with a blank space for writing down page numbers. I printed it out on a half sheet so they could glue it into their notebook on the first page as a place to start. Next, we made a title for the first unit: Science Inquiry. The students were able to personalize the page (and will continue to do this throughout the year as we explore new topics.)  This is an example of Emma' s page: Okay...so once we have done this it's time to get down to business.  I wanted a page that shows the set up of a notebook entry.  First, we discussed it as a class and I wrote it on an anchor ...

Black holes are mysterious chasms so destructive and unforgiving that not even light can escape their deadly wrath. Yet, as astrophysicist Caleb Scharf reveals, these chasms in space-time don't just vacuum up everything that comes near them; they also spit out huge energy beams and clouds of matter, profoundly shaping the universe around them. Dr. Scharf takes a tour of the latest black-hole research, peers into the dark heart at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy , and asks: “Would life on Earth even be possible without these celestial monsters?” Caleb Scharf  is director of the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University,   writes the “Life, Unbounded” blog for  Scientific American,  and is the author of the new book, Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos. Before & After -- Groove to time-warping tunes -- Try our cosmic cocktail of the night, the Gamma Ray -- Hot off the p...

I know...I know...you have heard me say this a million times.  It is important to have groups in science and to have individual jobs while you are working together! So how do you introduce it the first time???? We begin by Introducing our science groups. Each group has 4 people in it (as best as possible - because I have 22 students I do have two groups with 5 in them). Each child is assigned a color as you see.  Then I have a chart that shows the jobs. I can easily rotate the tiles daily to switch jobs. We began working as groups by setting expectations.  If you are going to work as a group on a task, what do you need to do in order to be successful? And what do the jobs mean? Then we worked on two simple tasks. The first was to work as a team to build a house of cards. The next was to work as a team to solve a cup challenge. I love this second challenge! It is one I learned from FOSS several years ago and truly involves team work.  You will need 6 solo cups,1 rubbe...

  The beginning of school is all about creating a classroom community. What better way then to work in small groups to build a structure?   Here's what we did.  First, I created 5 bags with spoons, plastic cups (Dixie size), paper clips, wire, straws, paper plates and tape. Then I pulled sticks to create random grouping....after all, we are supposed to learn to work together with ALL of our classmates. I did work it out so there were two girls and two boys in each group.    Students were asked to work together to create the tallest structure possible. They had to work together and had a time limit of about 15 minutes. We stressed that this was a challenge, not a competition and at the end of it, we would congratulate the winners of this challenge.  Bad sportsmanship in my classroom is NOT tolerated.   Enjoy the photos and see how simple this would be to recreate in your classroom this week.                  ...