This is a cute little tool that allows you to set the class a time limit for a given task, and then count down the time left with some fun background music. There are 10 tunes included, ranging from a 30 second Countdown theme tune, 57 seconds Hawaii Five-0 or a 7 minute piece of Mozart. If you want you can even upload your own mp3 file to use instead.
There are several different ways you can use the name picker, and they don’t all involve names!
This tool lets you input a list of names/text and then go to either a fruit machine or typewriter view. Names are then picked at random.
I used it to get students to to speak at random, picking the next speaker from the list. Clicking the “remove” button will take the chosen name out of the list so they do not appear twice.
It could be also used with keywords or a topic heading. In typewriter mode one word at a time will appear letter by letter (and they dont get to see the other words). Students could then have to give a definition of the word, or one student with their back to the board has to guess the word from the descriptions given by other students. There’s many ways this tool could be used.
These chemists are saying that the primary cause is physical, not chemical. Their explanation: nucleation sites. If you have a liquid that is supersaturated with gas (like soda, which is pumped full of carbon dioxide), a nucleation site is a place where the gas is able to form bubbles. Nucleation sites can be scratches on a surface or specks of dust – anywhere that you have a high surface area in a very small volume. That’s where bubbles can form.
Mentos seem to be loaded with nucleation sites. In other words, there are so many microscopic nooks and crannies on the surface of a Mento that an incredible number of bubbles will form when you drop it in a bottle of soda. Since the Mentos are also heavy enough to sink, they react with the soda all the way to the bottom. The escaping bubbles quickly turn into a raging foam, and the pressure builds dramatically. Before you know it, you’ve got a big geyser happening!
Another quick post to point you in the direction of a post I made on Whiteboard Blog a few weeks ago about being careful of your online presence once you stop being a student and start being a teacher.
Just a quick post to mention some of the pseudoscience that accompanies talk of Brain Gym in schools, and a request to try and not get sucked into the hype. Brain Gym can be a quick way of breaking up a lesson with a short fun activity, and it is in this way that I have used some little “brain gym” style games in the past. But there is a lot of rubbish spoken about it too.
Brain Gym is being taught with pseudoscientific explanations that undermine science teaching and mislead children about how their bodies work.
To answer another one of the questions you submitted. Trying to explain why the brightness of bulbs in a circuit changes can be tricky. It can be helpful to imagine different analogies/models to explain what is happening.
A battery with one bulb connected is your standard to compare things to. Electricity flows from one end of the battery to the other, flowing through the bulb as it goes, making the bulb light up.
Adding a second bulb in series will increase the total resistance in the circuit. The bulbs will be dimmer than the single bulb.
Adding a second bulb in parallel is a different situation. You have added a second parthway for the electricity to flow, The resistance is greater than a single bulb, but is is not as high as the two bulbs in parallel. The two bulbs will be brighter.
A “cars on the highway” analogy may help explain the distinction: think of a wide highway narrowing to a one-lane bridge to cross a river. Now imagine that in order to get rid of traffic jams, the highway department builds another one-lane bridge over the river. The “resistance” (in this case analogous to the width), of both bridges stays the same, but the amount of “current” or traffic that can cross the river has increased, so the overall “resistance” of the entire system has decreased. Taken from here.
In a series circuit, each bulb you add will make the brightness of the bulbs dimmer and dimmer
In a parallel circuit, the brightness of the bulbs does not change with the addition of more bulbs (but if you added many parallel circuits, eventually all of the bulbs would dim down as you approached the capacity of the battery)
The GCSE Bitesize page may help explain things to you too.
More Links and Resources
Here are some more links that hopefully will help with teaching circuits
The free circuit builder Crocodile Elementary is now called Yenka Basic Circuits, and you can get it here. This will let you build circuits to your heart’s content!
For a quick 10 minute preview, that explains some aspects of circuits. Go to Furry Elephant, and choose series or parallel circuits. It literally only allows you 10 minutes though.
If you want to do your own Diet Coke and Mentos experiment, then you will need some kind of mechanism to allow you to release the mentos into the Coke from a safe distance.
You could probably cobble something together yourself, but one thing that you can buy is the Geyser Tube, which is available from gadget stores such as Firebox for about a fiver.
Put the mentos in the tube, then pull the string and stand back. The pin will pull out and release the mints into the Coke.
Try this as part of a Sc1 investigation – test different brands of cola, types of fizzy drink etc.
On a more classical slant, for Space check out the Planets Suite by Holst such as Jupiter, or for classification try Carnival of Animals by Saint Saens. Good cross curricular links with music too.
You should be able to find these on ITunes and most probably YouTube too…. although the videos may not be appropriate to show though (or accessible in your school)
