09.25.2015
Written By: Becca Mackenzie
Today we kicked off the start of our second year doing outreach at KIPP NorthStar Academy. We had a great time meeting the students we’ll be working with for the rest of the year.
Having the advantage of hindsight this year, we made some adjustments to our opening session from last year, deciding that it’d be best to cut down on the amount of lecture and get the students doing some science right away! So, after a short introduction, we set up 6 small stations and in groups of 2-3, the students rotated around having about 6 minutes to work at each station.
The stations:
- Strings in a box – A box with 12 ports for strings was prepared. The strings were attached to each other, but the students weren’t allowed to look inside the box until the end when they had assigned all the connections. Despite their expectations, none of the strings were connected to the port directly across and some of them were connected to two strings and some to none. It was a good lesson about being aware of your assumptions when starting an experiment.
- Liquid nitrogen with balloon and flowers- Probably the fan favorite of the experiments, students dipped a balloon into liquid nitrogen and watched it shrink… took it out and watched it expand. There was even more delight when students smashed flowers into pieces after they were frozen in liquid nitrogen.
- Cloud in a bottle- An experiment from last year’s opening session, where students pressurize a pop bottle with acetone inside, release the pressure and see a cloud form in the bottle. We provided a few other variables (food coloring, powders etc.) so that the students could test the conditions under which clouds would form. There are many examples of this on the internet- here’s one of them.
- Mystery Maze- A completely sealed box was made with a marble enclosed, along with a few shapes mounted to the walls of the box. Using the motion of the marble, the students were asked to map out the inside of the box. This was a particularly challenging task. We were hoping that they would get the message that in real science experiments, there is no lid to take off. At the end of the day, you’re conclusions are only as good as the results of your experiment.
- Floating Ping Pong Ball- Using a blow dryer, we had students suspend a ping pong ball in the air and slowly tilt the dryer. The ball stayed suspended in the air due to Bernoulli’s Principle.
- Mystery Powder- We gave the students a mystery powder and asked them to determine the identity of the powder based on the way it reacted with a different liquids. I think the students really enjoyed the challenge of this station and felt like they had accomplished something when they figured it out.
Overall, we were very pleased with the first day. The students were involved and interested in what was going on!