Spring Break

This week is Spring Break for both Utah school districts here in Cache Valley. I don't know about Idaho, but I haven't had any response from the Idaho schools at all this year. So no substitute teaching and no presentations.

The last two weeks, however, have been pretty busy. I've been to River Heights and Wellsville Elementary Schools for a whole days worth of presentations each, and North Park Elementary had their science fair. I did a very informal tour of the solar system for the science fair presentation, as people were coming in and out at different times. And then the biggie: My first middle school presentations using Stellarium was last Tuesday at Spring Creek Middle School in Providence. I spent the entire day giving 6th grade presentations. A student teacher at Spring Creek was actually the one who contacted me, so the presentations were all on constellations for her classes and her cooperating teacher's. Her advisor from Utah State University showed up, so I had a chance to talk to him.

The 6th grade constellation presentation is specifically designed to answer some questions for the kids that appear on the state exam. One of the questions shows a diagram of the Sun at noon, with the line art of a constellation behind it, another constellation at the eastern horizion, and a third on the western horizon. The kids are asked to identify which of the three constellations the Sun will be in when it sets. The correct answer is the same one as it is in at noon, but from working at the Clark Planetarium, I learned that this is not an easy question for 12-year-olds to understand. The other questions I try to answer have to do with the coordinate systems used in astronomy, and the relationship between star brightness and star distances. If anyone has a 6th grader, or knows a 6th grade teacher, please let them know about our programs, and direct them to our outreach website, Jr Science & Astronomy (http://starhousediscovery.org/jrsciastro.html)

home science experiment

A science experiment idea from Neil Dabb, one of the other people working on the StarHouse Discovery Center.

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SCIENCE!!: While I was doing some research on air I came across several references to a myth that hot water will freeze faster than cold. Some referred to this as the Mpemba effect and that it stemmed from a young boy in Africa (named Mpemba) who did some experiments to prove this. Many “scientists” tried to duplicate the findings. While many of them were unable to duplicate this experiment, others have determined that there may be some validity depending on what is in the water (for example, we know that salt water freezes at a much lower temperature than fresh water), atmospheric and other conditions. Something as simple as the shape of the container may affect how fast the water freezes.

While the science behind this phenomenon is complex, the experiments themselves can easily be done by the youngest of students. And this can be a great introduction to the scientific method, and making sure there is only one difference between the various test samples. The water in one country obviously will have different impurities than the water in another country. The barometric pressure changes from day to day. All of these things will need to be taken into account, but this effect happens sometimes and we still aren’t sure why. Perhaps some of your classes would like to see if they can figure it out.

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Give it a try, see what you come up with