Posts Tagged: #randomactofscience
waves on a lake
On a camping trip a while ago, we had a site that overlooked a small, calm lake in the Uintas. From a perch we could toss small rocks into the lake and watch the ripples they created. Tossing two rocks at the same time made it so that we could see what happens when the two sets of waves overlap.
You might want to look at the video up close, or even pause it at certain spots to see what’s happening. What do you observe? What patterns do you notice? Where else could this happen?
light in gelatin
Some science investigations are especially fun to do at home. Playing with light and playing with jello are each great activities for indoors. This investigation prompt puts these two things together.
Here’s a video that I made at home, with no fancy lab or equipment — the perfect setting for most science-in-the-making. This is just to give you some ideas of where you can start, but there’s lots more you can play with and do.
In summary, all you need to do is make a gelatin dessert in your choice of flavor/color. Plain gelatin works great, too, but it doesn’t smell as good. When we make it, we just use half as much water (or don’t add any chilled water) and let the gelatin set in the refrigerator overnight. Then, cut out any shapes you’d like and put them on a surface like wax paper, a cutting board, or even just a clean table. Use a small flashlight or laser pointer to shine through the jello from the side, and observe what the light looks like as it goes into, through, and out of the jello. In my investigation in the video, I discovered some new things about how the light gets bent and focused; and I learned that my yellow jello lets through certain colors of light, but not others. I thought this was all really surprising and interesting, especially knowing that it was all caused by my 99 cent box of generic, lemon dessert.
Many other people do jello optics as well. Our friends at the Exploratorium in San Francisco showcase jello optics as one of their “science snacks.” Once you get started you’ll probably find other experiments to create on your own; or if you’re in a course I’m teaching you may be crafting lenses or other light bending and bouncing shapes with jello at home or in the lab.
hot chocolate effect
We often imagine that good science is the kind of thing that studies the dynamics of distant stars and a cure for disease. Sure, it does work on these big problems. But it is just as focused on and important to our everyday experiences.
Here’s my prime example. This is me at home, stirring some hot chocolate. It turns out that hot chocolate can demonstrate a very novel effect that you probably have never noticed even if you’ve stirred hundreds of mugs of the beverage. Once you realize it’s right in front of you, you may be forever cursed/blessed with the tendency to tap the bottom of your mug after you’ve stirred the chocolate in.
My hope is that you would want to try this out and think of ways to investigate what’s going on. If you’re in one of my classes, you’ll probably be given this as an assignment or even as the subject of an entire lab. You would consider trying out variations to see if you can find what causes the effect: What if you used something other than hot chocolate? Or different kinds of hot chocolate? Or different mugs? Or other ingredients? By changing the conditions, you might start to narrow down what makes this effect. At the same time it can be really challenging, because changing one variable could change another; and sometimes we don’t even recognize when a variable is changing.
Something I like about this investigation is that it naturally makes you consider your own model about sound and the hot chocolate. When you decide to change something in this system, you naturally have some idea about why that may or may not work, and it’s based on what you’re imagining is happening in the hot chocolate and how you might think that sound works. The results of your test affect your model and give you insight into what test to try next. This is, in essence, how science works.
Studying the hot chocolate effect is one of my favorite science investigations in the whole world. I introduce it to students, teachers, and scientists whenever I can because:
- Once you have experienced the effect, you may be forever cursed/blessed with tapping your mug of hot chocolate to hear this phenomenon, and you hopefully will share it with anyone else around when you are enjoying your beverage. You may even start investigating the effect by honing in on specific variables and testing specific conditions.
- We often think science is about warping space and curing disease. And that’s correct, but those are just a couple of examples. Scientific pursuits are at hand in all kinds of scenarios, and sometimes you just have to look a little more closely. You might have stirred hot chocolate hundreds of times and never noticed this.
- Also, people–especially scientists–often think they know the explanation for this right away. They usually don’t. (I’m speaking for myself as well.) And why should they? There’s a lot going on here, and we should embrace not knowing right away. Simply diving into this human endeavor of science is something we should celebrate.
- And even when you understand an “answer” to this, it usually isn’t finished. One “answer” just leads to more questions, and this effect is a prime example of where this can lead you down lots of rabbit holes.
Enjoy your hot chocolate, and your science.
science at home: noticing and record keeping
Schooling in a collaborative environment with a collective vision is no small task in any time, and that’s probably ten times more apparent in the middle of the pandemic. The educational system we’re used to, in spite of owning its share of flaws, is a monumental invention and a well-designed piece of community engineering. We can’t just dump the design we’ve had and expect it to work well in another context — especially in the midst of disease, job losses, structural inequalities, and limited resources.
I wrote about how I think we should forgive ourselves and not expect so much from at-home, online education. In fact, I think that this gives us a chance to think about what we really value about education and what goals we might have in mind. Mostly, though, let’s stop expecting that anything at home can approximate what we have at school. I think that’s silly and we shouldn’t abuse ourselves trying to do more than what we can expect of the current situation. (Writing that piece helped me a lot in trying to figure out some things, and I’m happy to talk with anyone more about our big educational ideas and ideals.)
But this brings us to another question: What can we do now? What can our students do? If education isn’t the same, then what is it, especially in light of trying to get kids to engage in authentic science, its questions and practices and general engagement with the natural world? As I think about what we’re trying to do with school science, it’s clear that we want to make it more tied to authentic science; so if we move school online and at-home, how can we make sure that we’re just not moving science further away from authentic practice, wonder, and the natural world?
I got inspiration from Billy Barr, described by some as a hermit, who’s spent 50 years living in solitude in the Rocky Mountains. I like Billy, especially the fact that he admits that his lifestyle and how he does it is pretty individualized. We can’t all imagine that we would want to live like him, nor that we would would do things exactly the same as him if we were in his situation. But one thing that I really appreciated was his idea of record keeping, to keep track of something, as part of his daily routine. In his case, some things that might seem really mundane have become the basis of longterm scientific study, even though he never aimed for that.
This makes me think about our own homes. Instead of taking something that we would want to do at school and re-engineer it for all of our kids at home, all separated from one another, what if they each had their own agency to notice, make observations, and collect their own records? How can they connect with their own, personal worlds?
I think that one of the hardest parts of doing science is the beginning: How do you start? You can’t know how to start until you become familiar with something and get inside of it. In Billy Barr’s case, he started measuring snow depths in the1970s simply because it was a part of his space and because he wanted something to do. It might have actually helped that he was isolated, because it gave him a focus on his unique environment. By tracking those levels over the years, his data eventually because useful, decades later, in climate science research. He’d never intended this in the beginning; he just happened to be in the right place and mindset to collect those data.
Perhaps more important than keeping daily records, Billy is especially familiar with his environment and is especially attuned to his surroundings. Too often we ask budding scientists to come up with an observation and a question and an investigation all prematurely, before they really get a feel for what they’re doing. I think it’s important to really be immersed in and familiar with a phenomenon, paying attention to and playing with it before we can really know how we’re going to investigate it.
So, I want to suggest that our students at home can take the lead in their immersed and isolated environments. What kinds of noticings and immersings can they take part in? They’ll come up with better ideas than me — and they’ll connect better with their own ideas than with mine — but I’m thinking of things like:
- which way does the wind blow today?
- how dark is it at night?1
- how tall is the grass?
- what time does the cat wake up to eat?
- how many drips of water from the faucet are there in a minute?
- where does the sun set each evening?
- what does it smell like outside?
- what do you hear in different spaces?2
- how does your dog take a step with each of its 4 legs?
- how many blossoms are on the tree today?
- how far can I see today?
- how much did it rain today?
- how many birds do I see?
- where are there cracks in the sidewalk? what do they look like?
- etc.
I know there are more and (I think) students will come up with observations that are especially relevant to them. I can imagine that they can use those experiences to develop their own questions, in their own culturally and physically relevant spaces, and that these can be (eventually) used by a teacher or a group to develop investigations and tie to modeling.
This is simply an idea, and I’m interested to hear what others can do (or would refuse to do) with it. Most of all, I want to shift focus when we ask people to do science at home and get a better, more authentic idea of what that could mean. I don’t think we need to force it into a curriculum that we’d imagine in our school buildings. It can, and probably should, be different.
Most of all, as I’m writing this during a pandemic, when we’re all vulnerable and beleaguered, let’s be kind to ourselves and to our students. Right now it’s enough to make it through each day. Maybe that can be a little easier if we can focus on the little things that surround us.
- I’m working on a way to study light pollution. Here’s a link to a form with some instructions and other information. I’d be interested in having others try this out: https://forms.gle/YuvWRUEaZx6shx4FA ↩
- Canyonlands Field Institute, a favorite educational organization of mine, has this lesson on creating a sound map: https://cfimoab.org/create-a-sound-map/. For an at-home project, I might do something different, but I really like notion of creating a map that models what sounds are like in different spaces, and trying to figure out how to represent those. ↩
forces, matter, and energy
The concepts of force, matter, and energy get mixed together and confounded. For example, it’s easy to say that forces, matter, and energy are all in the following photos. But these are all distinct from one another, even though they’re related. Where and how do you see forces, matter, and energy in these?
a balloon on a wall
Anna backpacking across Death Canyon Shelf in Grand Teton N.P.
an orb weaver spider, Antelope Island
Anna and Grace on the causeway to Antelope Island
Needles District, Canyonlands N.P.
Pole Creek crossing, Wind Rivers
bubble in hands
Generally, I don’t like to define words up front. In this case, I just want us to start painting edges around these terms, not so much to define them as to make sure we recognize that they’re all playing in different but complementary fields.
A force is an action. It’s the push or pull between two objects. These always come in pairs exerted between two objects, one on the other and the other on the one.
Matter is stuff. You can put it a container and close the lid. Sometimes that container will need to be really, really big, but if it’s a thing or a collection of things and takes up space, you have some matter.
Energy — oh, energy. This, to me, is the hardest because it feels so obvious but also isn’t either a piece of something nor something I push against. It’s a property of matter that describes what the stuff is doing or what it could do. Energy is transferred or changed in matter by forces (even though not all forces do this).
Clear? No, I didn’t think so. For now, let’s be content but confused with the idea that these three categories are completely different, like Doritos are different from love is different from sound. You know that one might have relevance to the other, but you can’t compare Doritos to love to sound. They aren’t even on the same plane.