Waves and Slinkies!

A while back we used slinkies to demonstrate transverse and longitudinal waves.  Here are some of the results.

CSI Science Class

We covered light, optics, and fluorescence in class.  As a culminating activity, we set up a crime scene investigation for my students to work through.

THE HORROR!!

I brought in a stuffed animal owl (Thisty the Owl) from home to play the victim.  He was missing and the students had to follow a UV blood trail to find the body.

Ship this poor bird off to the morgue.

They also used magnifying glasses to match fingerprints to our database.  This gave us suspects to interrogate.  I wrote scripts for students to follow, and I even interrogated my guinea pig, Bridget.

Besides fingerprints and blood, the students founf hairs and fibers at the crime scene.  They used microscopes to match with our database of fibers to narrow our search to a final suspect.

Guinea pig hair has a bumpy texture.

Human hair does not.

Using the evidence they gathered and the testimony of the suspects, the students had to justify who they chose to blame the crime on.  (It was Bridget)

Roller Coasters!

Tis week we talked about how gravitational potential energy is used to propel roller coasters through twists, turns, and loops.  In class, we made roller coasters using 3x5 cards.  We each had a potential energy "budget" that came from a ramp set at a fixed height.  If someone wanted to use more energy, they had to design a ride that went off the table to the ground.

My Student's are making a Video Game. Pt 1

Last semester, I dabbled in RPG Maker VX Ace with my computer class.  I had them help out with elements of a game that I produced.  I've decided to pull out all of the stops and give them complete creative control of the building process.

RPG Maker VX Ace has a wonderful mapping utility.

The plan is to have them handle all of the writing and design elements of the game while I do the grunt work over the course of the next semester.  So far, I've had them begin the writing of the story and even write up a budget for our "game studio."  These fulfill the requirements of my class to review MS Word and Excel.

The blank map is used to select random shapes for continents.

Next, I am doing some work with GIMP to teach image manipulating.  The first thing we've done is made world maps.  Each student starts with a "blank" map.  They then select chunks to be the continents and add details to separate the biomes and climates.  These designs can then be translated into RPG Maker VX Ace.

Here's something I cooked up in GIMP.

Meteorites!

With the recent meteorite action in Russia, I thought it would be a great time to bust out my own meteorite activity in class.  I put dishes of flour on the tables and had students drop objects from different heights.  They also tested to see if an object with more mass would make a larger crater.

More Newton Footage

Our school got ahold of some MacBook Airs, so I decided to flex my film editing skills with this one.  We reviewed Newton's laws through a series of activities and I recorded them with my high speed camera.  Here's the result.

Thor vs. Physics!

To help demonstrate Newton's 3rd Law of Motion, I have a student stand on a rotating platform and swing my homemade Mjolnir (http://rjcosplay.blogspot.com/2012/05/my-mjolnir.html).  I had "Loki" stand in front of him and I assured her that she could not be hit with the mighty hammer.  Sure enough, every swing of the hammer moved "Thor" in a circle in the opposite direction of the hammer and he never landed a blow.

We also demonstrated the 3rd Law by using balloons.  A couple students aimed them at their foreheads and let go.  The air rushing out of the balloons forced the ballons into their faces. 

As a bonus, we did a demonstration on the conservation of momentum.  A ping pong ball dropped on a golf ball is launched super high due to the larger mass of the golf ball.