Teaching ScienceIdeas and help for trainee Science teachers

What happens when you drop an extended slinky spring? That’s the question this video asks. What do you think?

Here’s the answer:

And here’s an extension:

I’ve said this before, but I have a theory you can teach most of the Science curriculum using clips from Mythbusters And here’s another one that would be great in a GCSE physics class.

This is part of the episode “Mythssion Control” and this experiment is called “Crash Force” – if the video vanished from YouTube in the future try searchng for that.

Basically – the scenario is this. If you have two cars driving towards each other at 50mph and they smash into each other, the crash is the equivalent of one car driving into a stationary wall at 100mph. Or is it?

What do the students think?

Play the video until about the 1 minute 50 mark. Then get the students to make their predictions and explain their reasons.

Then play the rest of the video.

Surprised?

If you want – you can also show the first half of the experiment (up to about the 7 minute mark) where they test this in small scale – it might even be something you could try in the classroom first.

A great little factsheet by neilslorance. Ask students to make their own factsheets.

Here are two videos that show the famous Hammer vs Feather experiment:

Apollo 15 On The Moon

Mythbusters Vacuum Chamber

The Institute of Physics’ ‘Ever Wondered Why? Roadshow’ is a touring physics-based show that brings the wonders of Science to secondary school pupils up and down the country. Through a series of experiments and spectacular demonstrations, it shows how so many truly mind-boggling natural phenomena are based on physics – like why the sky’s blue, the Sun’s hot or the stars twinkle.

A series of videos covering the roadshow experiments is now live on their YouTube channel, demonstrating a number of different topics that would prove useful to any Physics teacher.

This workshop is part of the Stimulating Physics Network, you can find out more information here: www.stimulatingphysics.org

This series of videos have been produced by the National STEM Centre and the Institute of Physics. They are mostly aimed at teachers and illustrate how to perform simple demonstrations and use particular pieces of equipment. The videos use apparatus that should be available in most secondary school science departments.

Some topics also have versions of the video that could be used with students in the classroom.

The topics covered in the videos are:

• Demonstrating diffraction using laser light
• Static electricity and charge with an ‘electric sausage’
• Using an electron diffraction tube
• Gravity and the motion of projectiles with the Monkey and Hunter demonstration
• Transmission of electricity along power lines
• Demonstrating thermal conductivity
• Using a Van de Graaff generator
• A simple wave machine

Most of the videos also come with links to download the video file, plus downloadable teachers notes.

You can see the videos here.

Teaching about Electricity? This video from the New Scientist blog about the Lords of Lightning act should spark some interesting class discussions…

Read about it here.

Talk about Tesla Coils, what is causing the sparks, what kind of suit must the men be wearing to not be killed by the massive voltages involved etc.

Plus, it’s pretty spectacular.

This series of videos have been produced by the National STEM Centre and the Institute of Physics. They are mostly aimed at teachers and illustrate how to perform simple demonstrations and use particular pieces of equipment.

Some topics have versions of the video that could be used with students in the classroom. The topics covered in the videos are:

• Demonstrating diffraction using laser light
• Static electricity and charge with an ‘electric sausage’
• Using an electron diffraction tube
• Gravity and the motion of projectiles with the Monkey and Hunter demonstration
• Transmission of electricity along power lines
• Demonstrating thermal conductivity
• Using a Van de Graaff generator
• A simple wave matching

Access the STEM videos here: http://stem.org.uk/cxhd

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.