kids and science
jstemwedel | July 14, 2009Not that the art has anything to do with Bastille Day, but it seemed like as good an occasion as any to share some more of their work.
And, for the record, if art classes somehow lead the Free-Ride offspring to adopt an all-black wardrobe, they are bloody well going to find themselves reading Sartre. In our house, moody black-clad young people are philosophers!
From the younger Free-Ride offspring:
I'm told this is a water buffalo striding to the water hole by moonlight. My sense, from the drawing, is that a water buffalo could sneak up on you on a dark night.
From the elder Free-Ride…
jstemwedel | July 10, 2009Actually, the Free-Ride offspring are just taking a few art classes this summer. We haven't packed them off to live in a garrett somewhere. (Not that we haven't given the matter thought.)
Here are some drawings from their first week.
By the younger Free-Ride offspring:
The light brown lop-eared rabbit in the picture is, apparently, an homage to the rabbit I had in grad school (long gone by the time either of the sprogs was on the scene).
By the elder Free-Ride offspring:
I'm especially fond of the cacti and the bug in the foreground.
jstemwedel | July 10, 2009For the record, this is the entry I would have posted last Friday if I hadn't been occupied with provisioning for our Independence Day barbecue. (Indeed, regular commenter $0.01 saw me at Trader Joe's last Friday doing that provisioning. "I haven't checked the sprog blog yet," said she. "I haven't posted it yet!" I replied.)
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In the run up to the July 4th holiday, the Free-Ride family dredged up some "common knowledge" about U.S. presidents. Of course, we started with Washington, but it wasn't long until we got to Lincoln.
Younger offspring: Abraham Lincoln was born in a log…
jstemwedel | July 10, 2009Why is it that on hot days, the Free-Ride offspring take up the question of how animals stay warm on cold days? Does this kind of consideration make the heat seem more desirable?
Younger offspring: During the winter, why do some animals go underground to get warm?
Dr. Free-Ride: Why do you think?
Younger offspring: Their holes underground are warmer because they're closer to the center of the earth, and the center of the earth is made of magma, which is hot.
Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. When I lie down on the ground, I'm closer to the center of the earth when I'm standing up, but I don't feel any…
jstemwedel | June 26, 2009At day camp yesterday, the sprogs (and their fellow campers) had a visitor:
Elder Free-Ride offspring; She was an astrophysicist. You know what that is, right?
She talked to us about studying light that comes from space, and all the different kinds of light there are traveling across space. There's infrared, and ultraviolet, and even X-rays. And, of course, there's white light that we can see with our eyes.
While there are many different kinds of lights, there are only some colors of light that our eyes can detect. A bunch of those are actually mixed together in white light. You can…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2009This just came up in a plenary session I'm attending, looking at how best to convey the nature of science in K-12 science education (roughly ages 5-18).
It's not really a question about the content of the instruction, which people here seem pretty comfortable saying should include stuff about scientific methodology and critical testing, analysis and interpretation of data, hypothesis and prediction, what kind of certainty science can achieve, and so forth. Rather, it's a question about how that content is organized and framed.
It was proposed by one of the people in the room that an explicit…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2009Last week, the Free-Ride offspring and I used our Cell Project kit from Galaxy Goo to build some three-dimensional models of animal cells out of clay.
In addition to the instructions provided with the kit, we whipped out a biology text book to have a look at some photos of cross-sections of cells (enlarged a lot).
The instructions talked us through modeling the various organelles of the cell: the cell nucleus (including the nucleolus and the nuclear membrane), the endoplasmic reticulum, ribosomes, golgi body, mitochondria, vacuoles, and lysosomes.
The mitochondria, for example, we modeled…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2009Overheard at Casa Free-Ride:
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Hey, some of the silkmoths are mating already!
Elder offspring: With each other?
Savor that moment of stunned silence!
A bunch of the pupating silkworms are still in the cocoons, but as of Thursday, about ten had emerged as moths. I was actually lucky enough to be in the room with my camera as this one emerged.
Judging by the size of her abdomen (largish), we're guessing it's a female. She still hasn't "inflated" her wings yet.
And, we got to watch this female lay eggs:
The eggs are the little yellow spheres. In addition to…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2009The Free-Ride offspring are almost at the end of another school year, so we thought this would be a good time for them to think about some summer reading recommendations. Each of them chose two favorite books that have something to do with science. Below, they offer their kid-to-kid reviews.
The younger Free-Ride offspring's recommendations:
To help calibrate these recommendations, the younger Free-Ride offspring is 8 years old and is finishing second grade.
Magic School Bus Inside Ralphie: A Book about Germs by Scholastic Books
I got this book in the book exchange my class had and I read…
jstemwedel | June 8, 2009Three weeks after the first cocoon was built, the first of the intrepid Free-Ride silk moths have emerged.
They are big. The Free-Ride offspring judge them cute. I haven't been fully convinced. But in time, I may come around.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half thinks the moth pictured directly above is male, while the two in the first picture are probably female (owing to their gigantic abdomens, which we presume are full of eggs awaiting fertilization).
Speaking of fertilization, we haven't seen any attempts at it yet. But it's quite likely the moths are tired out from their efforts to get…
jstemwedel | June 5, 2009We're going on three weeks since the first of the Free-Ride silkworms made a cocoon.
So far, there have been no signs of anyone trying to get out. So we'll have to wait a while yet before we witness the miracle of life (or of silkmoths bumping bug uglies, depending on your perspective).
In the meantime, we've heard reports from the field about other silkworms that came home from school.
In one household, while the child with primary responsibility for the silkworms was still trying to secure a supply of mulberry leaves, the silkworms were fed apple leaves. The silkworms did not die.…
grrlscientist | June 3, 2009tags: NYC, Upper West Side, Manhattan, science, education
Nick with his potato gun,
on the downtown-bound A Train.
Image: GrrlScientist, 3 June 2009.
Today as I was riding the A Train to the library so I could use their free wifi, I ran into Nick and his friend who are high school students in NYC. Their hobby is science. Physics, to be precise. In the above picture (blurry -- the train provides a very bumpy ride), you can see Nick with one of his physics experiments, a potato gun that he designed and built using PVC pipe. Since I have designed and built a few items from PVC myself (mostly…
jstemwedel | May 29, 2009Since the school science fair is safely behind us, we can give you a peek at the projects the Free-Ride offspring presented. (We couldn't do this prior to the science fair without running the risk that the sprogs would be accused of lifting their projects from a blog post.)
Here's the elder Free-Ride offspring's project board (or at least the central panel of it):
Originally, the idea was just to grow different kinds of crystals and draw some conclusions on why different types of substance grow the kinds of crystals that they do. However, that was deemed not sufficiently quantitative. So…
jstemwedel | May 27, 2009The happy news and the wistful news concern separate matters, though.
First, the happy news:
Science fair projects were completed well before dinnertime the day before they were due -- and this despite the fact that the Walgreen's photo-printing kiosk was not "while you shop" but "come back in an hour".
The elder Free-Ride offspring (who was required, as were all fourth graders in the school, to submit a project) received a very high grade for the project. The younger Free-Ride project (whose participation, as a second grader, was optional) was awarded the third place ribbon for the grade…
jstemwedel | May 24, 2009Science fair projects are due Tuesday morning. Can you guess what we're doing today?
The elder Free-Ride offspring tried to argue that preliminary experiments (growing crystals from solutions four different solids) had to be omitted from the project write-up. Why? Well, because the elder Free-Ride offspring had originally planned to use solutions of two additional solids in this experiment. It's unthinkable that anything was learned from growing four kinds of crystals rather than six! And reporting on unfinished experiments is just not done!
Or, the Free-Ride parental units hypothesized…
jstemwedel | May 22, 2009The Free-Ride offspring have been using the silkworms as a springboard for discussions of math as well as biology.
We started with 16 silkworms hatched from eggs that came home last June. They were joined, a couple weeks after they hatched, by another 15 silkworms brought home from the science classroom at school.
At this point, a number of those silkworms have taken the plunge and pupated.
Counting cocoons:
As I type these words, there is one silkworm making good initial progress on a cocoon.
There are twenty cocoons that seem to be finished (including one that has two silkworms in it --…
jstemwedel | May 22, 2009You may recall our dispatch last weekend when the largest of the Free-Ride silkworms indicated their readiness to pupate.
They didn't figure it out right away.
Being ready to pupate doesn't mean an instant cocoon:
Actually, it took us a little while to figure out that the tall cylindrical plastic container in which we'd set them up with lots of sticks was not working so well for them. They kept trying to get their silk to stick to the plastic walls, and it just didn't. So we switched over to a shallow rectangular container with paper tubes. That seemed to work better.
Here are some…
jstemwedel | May 17, 2009About half of the Free-Ride silkworms (who you know from pictures and videos) have decided that it's time to pupate.
Of course, we immediately broke out the video camera. But, then the truth started to dawn on us.
It takes a good while for a silkworm to make a cocoon. The ones that seem ready started almost 24 hours ago, and we're only now starting to see convincing signs that there will be cocoons soon.
Because, having never made cocoons before, the silkworms kind of flail around for awhile, spinning silk and trying to stick it to surfaces it won't stick to, then tumbling down, then trying…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2009We offer a couple more video sprog segments with the much enlarged silkworms. It won't be long before they're spinning cocoons (we're guessing -- and the mulberry trees are hoping), so these may be the last of their baby videos:
Silkworm breeding:
A perfect opportunity for a little child labor:
My better half recommends the site wormspit.com for useful information about raising silkworms.
The worms may pupate any day now. (Apparently, the sure sign that this is imminent is that the clear their guts. Ew.) I don't know if silkworms will make their cocoons on camera, but if they do, we'll…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2009Those wee little silkworms which you saw in videos last week are growing at an impressive rate.
Here, see for yourself:
They're bigger!
Owing to their voracious appetites, the silkworms have sent us ransacking neighborhood mulberry trees (we've identified three so far)and bringing back a gallon of leaves at a time. They don't last long. At this point, the leaf-munching is loud enough that you can hear it if you hold your ear close to their container.
The day the silkworms molted:
My better half has graciously allowed me to post the picture of the molted silkworm faceplates here:
I…