Egg Adventure

The Challenge.

Don't be fooled by the appearance of a simple egg. It may look like ordinary albumen covered in a shell but...
Our super spy eggs had a challenge ahead of them and they needed suitable apparatus to carry and protect them. First off was to design a parachute that fell as safely and slowly from the top of a mountain (school clock tower) to freedom below.
Have a look at our photographs and see if you can work out why only 3 out of 9 super-spy eggs survived the jump. Better luck next time with the Rocket to the Moon challenge.

Egg Adventures

Fixing the Holes

There is a Hole in my Bucket....

There is a Hole in my Bucket....

The challenge was set.... to transport 500ml of water across the Year 2 playground using a bucket.

Sounds simple enough, but there were holes in their buckets. How could they fix the holes on a budget of 100 baht?

Unfortunately the most useful resources were the most expensive and the cheapest resources such as paperclips, a bargain at 1 baht each, proved not to be so useful.

Each group tackled the problem in a slightly different way. Some spent time planning and carefully considering their budget options. Others just shopped until the 100baht was gone and then planned their design.

There were certainly no bargains at the shop, although a late sale of 'buy 5cm of sellotape - get 5cm free' certainly helped a number of designs.

Interestingly the winning design proved to be the one with support attached to both the outside and the inside of the bucket.  They not only successfully carried 500ml of water across the playground without losing one drop; they did so and still had 22 baht change. Well done to Alina,  Aishwarya and Sandra for  a great design and great teamwork.

Colourful Science

Are colours really what they appear?

Are these petals actually red?



Can white light be coloured?

Can light travel round corners?

Find out this Thursday.

Raft building...the launch

After 2 weeks of building, careful last minute preparations led to the nail biting transportation of these delicate craft.

Would the tape hold? Would the bottles slip and plunge the passengers into the icy Bangkok swimming pool waters?


At the poolside, the teams prepared a launch order. Push the Red button team took the brave first launch.
Nerves were beginning to tell.

After paddles were collected the teams launched themselves.

We all learnt a lot about how to put a raft together. We hope you enjoyed the ECA.

Today'sbuilding...10 minutes to go...five minutes to go! Will we do it?

Raft building...with recycled bottles

We started to build our rafts this week.  the challenge is to build a raft which will carry a team member across the pool.  We used the displacement which we worked out last week to give us a rough idea of how much air we needed in the raft...but it is going to be trial and error.

We made a list of the materials we had available and shared them out equally.

We then got into our science groups and started to design and build.

Some of the bottles from the canteen were filthy, so we had to clean them up.

Raft building photos

Thursday 5th November

Please meet in Lab 4 as normal this week. We have an activity to do in the lab first before we go outside to get wet.

Chromatography and Microscopes

Have a look a these slideshows of pictures from a couple of our ECA sessions.



As you know, Ms Jane confessed to the crime of taking the trophy.  The reason was that she wanted to have it engraved for Mr Lazaro!

Think of all the time she could have saved if she had told us earlier.  Oh well, hope you enjoyed the journey of discovery!

Rocket Science

There are a lot of other after school science clubs going on around the world.  Read this article from the Guardian to find out more.


Stemnet is the name of the organisation from the UK which supports after school science and maths clubs.

Fingerprinting and Chromatography

We took fingerprints from glass by dusting the glass with talcum powder and carefully brushing away extra powder.

This left a white finger print. To make a copy of the fingerprint we gently placed a piece of tape over the white print and slowly removed the tape. We then stuck the tape to a piece of black paper to allow us to see it more easily. We then compared to the finger prints of the suspects.

Finger printing was hard because we didn't know which finger print was that correst one because there were so many!! The powder smell was very storng as well!!
Arm
I think the hardest part of fingerprinting was not brushing the fingerprints off when you were removing the excess powder from the glass. It was also very hard holding the glass without touching the outside and I nearly dropped the glass once.
Andrew

Chromatography

We made chromatograms of the ink from Miss Jane's pen and Mr Ben's pen. We also looked at the ink which spread from the sample which was taken at the scene of the crime.

We did this by making a small round circle of ink from the different pens on a piece of absorbent paper. We suspended it from a wooden splint so that the end of the paper was in the water, but the circle of ink was above the water level.

Scientists at Work.

Thanks to K. Gun

One gentleman who helps make this E.C.A. possible is K. Gun. He is a Secondary Science Technician and prepares and organises all the equipment for our science activities each week.
Thanks K. Gun

Who Dunnit?

Mr Lazaro is anxious for us to clear up the case of ...THE STOLEN TROPHY.

We found mud at the scene of the crime, but using a universal indicator, ruled out Ms Jane and Mr Ben. We collected glasses with possible finger prints. We also collected a writing sample...could we compare the ink to ink from Mr Ben's pen and Ms Jane's pen? And what about the hair sample which was left on the corner of the trophy box! Dunnn....Dun..Daaaaaaah!

We must try to figure out who committed the crime.

Could it be Ms Jane, teacher, mother and wife? Surely not!

How about Mr Ben, he can look a bit suspicious at times.

Or is it a clever piece of deception and Mr Lazaro was merely trying to cover his tracks!

Find out more about Chromatography, the study of ink.

Research how to take a finger print.

Discover what to look for when comparing hair samples.

Send emails to jasc or bewi or leave a comment on the blog.

See below for the slideshow from today.

Book reviews welcome

Do you enjoy reading books with science in, but don't like reading science books?

Try this blog post on the 3W science blog. It is written by a guest blogger...

If you'd like to be a guest blogger for a book review or article on this blog, send an article either as an email or as a word attachment to an email, to bewi or jasc.

Week 2 - making burglar alarms

We had great fun looking at the filth which was growing in the agar jelly...it's a good job that we use knives and forks at lunchtime.

We went on to use electrical components and tried to make a variety of circuits:

See the presentation.

We finally tried to make an electrical circuit which would make a buzzer go off when a door (in a model house) was opened.

There was lots of creative science going on.

We also used morse code using our buzzers...follow the link to see the morse code letters.

Bright Ideas!

 On Thursday your scientific skills are going to be used to investigate a range of electrical circuits.  Try the activity on this link for some virtual circuits.

Can you find out which famous scientist shown here first invented the light bulb?

Taking a shower...can it really be bad for you?

Well...you can't believe all that you read on the web, but according to this University of Colorado research, taking a shower can be bad for you. It's all to do with the bacteria in the shower head...Here is another link to the story.

I wonder how the bacteria on the agar plates is growing?