Teaching ScienceHelp for trainee Science teachers

Thanks to fellow twitterer Sophie Bessemer for tipping me off about these science resources from BP Educational Services, the education department of the energy company.

For Primary Science, there are some very useful resources in the Young Science Investigators series aimed at KS2 pupils. These resources include the following modules:

• Energy
• Our Environment
• Online Experiments

All these resources are free, but you do need to register with the site to get them although registration is also free.

It’s also worth taking a look at the free resources that you can order and have sent to your school such as posters and CD-ROM materials.

Take a look at these resources and see what you think. Could they be used to support science on your Interactive Whiteboard?

Had a request in Mondays session for the link to the Earth from Space at Night image. So here it is.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081005.html

(click to make bigger)

Also see : http://geology.com/articles/satellite-photo-earth-at-night.shtml

And here’s London from Space:

More night shots of London can be seen here:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/london_from_above_at_night.html

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/more_of_london_from_above_at_n.html

Bill Nye demonstrates a scale model of the solar system by riding his bike across a barren plain.

Richard Dawkins once wrote this about our solar system:

Find a large open space, and take a soccer ball to represent the sun. Put the ball down and walk ten paces in a straight line, stick a pin in the ground. The head of the pin stands for the planet Mercury. Take another nine paces beyond Mercury and put down a peppercorn to represent Venus.

Seven paces on, drop another peppercorn for Earth. One inch from Earth, another pin head represents the moon, the furthest place, lets remember, that we have so far reached.

Fourteen more paces to little Mars and ninety five paces to giant Jupiter, a ping pong ball. One hundred and twelve paces further, Saturn is a marble.

No time to deal with the outer planets, except to say the distances are much larger. But how far would you have to walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Pick up another football to represent it and set off on a walk for four thousand two hundred miles.

As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda, don’t even think about it.

A few photos from Scitt Science Day 2 – Sound. Quite a lot of fun was had making musical instruments from rubbish and then testing out string telephones.

More pics here.

Thanks James for sending me the link to this:

Sound cannot travel through a vacuum. Which explains this poster

Some more sounds links from past blog posts here:

Sound Infomation

Science and Music

And enjoy this Sound song

5F Sound Song from Simple Science on Vimeo.

Here’s a nice simple resource that could be used to teach Sound and Waves in Science. There are several sites that show oscilloscope traces when looking at sounds, and this is another one. It’s produced by Aartpack, and they call it a Digital Theramin – named after the staple musical instrument of 50s sci fi movies

What I like about this one is its simplicity. Plus it would work well on an interactive whiteboard to show how the shape of the sound “wave” changes as the pitch and volume changes.

Click the Menu button to show the optionss, and set it so that the Sine Waveform is set to a value, and the other 3 are turned off (no scale), like this:

Then if you click anywhere on the screen, a sine wave will be drawn and a note will be played (turn up your speakers!)

If you drag your finger/pen to the right the note will get higher and the waves will get closer together. Likewise drag your finger/pen to the left and the pitch will get lower.

If you drag up the screen the note will get louder, drag it down the screen and the note will get quieter. The amplitude of the sine wave will reduce.

This would be very nice to demonstrate sound waves at KS2 or Ks3.

The only drawback is that there is no way to set it up so it works without having to touch the board. I’d like to have seen a mode where you could place a button on the screen, and move that button up/down left/right to change the note. That way you could let go of the board to address the class and keep the note playing/displayed. I’m pleased to see it will resize to full-screen so you can make the resource fit the entire whiteboard.

There are more complicated settings that you can play with if you want to do some more advanced stuff, but the sine wave feature alone makes it a very handy bookmark to have for your Sound lesson! You can access the digital theramin/oscilloscope here.

There are other interactive resources on the Aartpack website too. It’s worth looking around the whole site to see what they have for other subjects too.

Great clip from last nights “Bang Goes the Theory” – a water powered jetpack

and remember, don’t try this at home.

From the BBC’s Bang Goes the Theory site.

Full instructions can be found here.

Rockets work by ejecting something out of the back and a so-called ‘reaction force’ then pushes the body of the rocket forward.

Here, water and air are shoved out the back. The water is heavier so that’s what gives the bottle the main kick forwards.

The energy to force the water out is stored as air pressure inside the bottle. You supply the energy as you pump air into the bottle.

The air pressure inside builds up and pushes on the water. But friction holds the cork in place and that pushes back on the water, so for a while nothing moves.

Once the friction force can no longer contain the pressure, the cork is shoved out and the pressure then acts on the water to eject it from the bottle.

Compared to the bottle, the water is heavy. So pushing water out at a moderate speed backwards gives the bottle a lot of forward speed.

It’s the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo landings and there’s a lot of good stuff on the web as we hit the actual anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 (in about 30 mins time in fact)

WeChoosetheMoon is an excellent recreation of the mission in real-time. With audio and video links to experience the launch as it happened.

You can also follow Apolloplus40 for live tweets (well, as-live)

The Big Picture continues its amazing series of images with a set of pics of Apollo 11. Some awesome images that are well worth storing for the next time you need to teach about the Moon.

A simple rocket made from a coke bottle, 1/4 filled with water and powered by a bicycle pump. (Can buy the kit from Hawkins Bazaar for about £12.99 here)

Great for talking about Forces. Make sure you do it somewhere where there’s a lot of space

Update – from www.Rokit.com

Science Education: Using ROKIT to “Bring Science Alive”

• A precision water rocket that self launches at a pre-determined pressure (2BAR).
• Providing the capability of repeatable experiments.
• Schools, colleges and Science Advisors throughout the world are using this exciting kit to demonstrate Laws of Motion.
• Rokit is a valuable visual tool for all levels of Science Education.

ROKIT for Primary Education demonstrates the principles of rocket propulsion, trajectory, streamlining and basic aerodynamics. It is also used in fun education projects such as ROKIT Golf, Space Travel etc.

ROKIT for Secondary Education is a precision water rocket that enables accurate and repeatable experiments to be performed. It can be used to measure and study velocity and acceleration, force, trajectory, thrust and drag.

About Rockets

A squid propels itself by filling its body with water and ejecting it backwards in order to move forwards. This is the principle used by rocket engineers. Space rockets use fuels that are burned in a chamber shaped rather like a bottle, with the neck pointing backwards. The burning fuel produces a large quantity of gas that is further expanded by the heat generated and this is ejected through the neck (or nozzle) of the “bottle” (normally called the combustion chamber) at a very high velocity, propelling the rocket in the opposite direction.

The ROKIT, like the squid, uses water as the driving agent and compressed air instead of heat to provide the energy.

For the technically minded the pressure in the bottle at launch (just before the brass bung releases) is about 18 x 104 N/m2 (or about 25 psi). The water is forced through a nozzle with a cross sectional area of about 1cm2 and this produces a theoretical thrust of about 18 Newtons (about 3.9lbs) at launch. As the water is ejected the ROKIT gets lighter resulting in an increased acceleration or ‘g’ force. This increasing ‘g’ force is one of the more unpleasant aspects of space flight that astronauts have to endure; a rocket leaving the earth’s atmosphere would have to keep up this increasing acceleration for some time. The ROKIT expels its charge of water in about 1 second so DON’T WORRY, IT’S NOT LIKELY TO GO INTO ORBIT!