Science in the Library

I'm trying to catch up on my blogging... Back in summer, as part of our STEAM 2018 year of STEAM programming, we did a fun engineering project making roller coaster ski jumps out of pipe insulators for marbles to "ski" down! I've been meaning to share the photos and videos and finally had time today. Here are the supplies I got: Pipe insulators Marbles Masking Tape I had to cut the pipe insulators in half, and did that from home. So you also need a strong knife, like for cutting meat but maybe sturdier than that. Then you have the kids get in groups of 3 or 4 and give each group of kids some insulator tubes and tape and some props and have them go to town! Each group will need a large space to work in, and one pitfall was kids trying to build their roller coasters around the other groups. That got hard sometimes, and they're kids, so they had difficulty navigating that in a polite way sometimes. I really wish I had provided more simple pr...

Last week kids came to Pasadena Library to learn about elastic energy and the Law of Conservation of Energy , and then build a helicopter that would rise up in the air at least briefly before coming down. We attached helium balloons to a homemade helicopter that runs on the elastic energy of a twisted-up rubber band, and since the apparatus itself is heavy enough, the whole thing generally floats gently down. (OK, some kids did have to add a weight in order to counteract the extreme lift of the helium.) Kids had a blast making their helicopters, even though it was not an easy project, and required a lot of tinkering and troubleshooting! I did this program before at Pasadena Public Library, and shared it on my blog a few years ago . I'm sharing this year's experience because I think I learned some things that might have improved the project back then. I first found the project in 2014 on curiositymachine.org . You may have to subscribe to get access to all their projec...

Last week I visited the Hastings Branch of Pasadena Public Library to present a program to their "STEAM Team," a monthly club they have for kids 9-12 years old. We did a program about electricity called "Make Your Own Electric Quiz." It was so much fun exploring the mathematical principles involved in electrical circuits, such as the inverse ratio relationship between voltage, resistance and current explored by Georg Ohm in the early 19th century. I LOVE anything to do with scientific laws, and we got deep into Ohm's law (I = V/R). Then kids wrote down math questions and answers on post-it notes, placing the post-its next to some brass paper fasteners I had prepped for them on a sheet of cardstock. On the other side, they wound a copper wire from the brass fastener for each question to the brass fastener for its correct answer. To reinforce the things we learned about Ohm's law, I deliberately used a battery source not intended for 5mm LED diodes--...

On Thursday, August 25th, while the rest of the library was closed early, kids and their parents were hanging out here in the children's Story Room learning about paleontology and center of gravity, and building their own dinosaurs! I showed a slide show about how scientists' concepts of dinosaurs has changed over the years, particularly when we think about how a dinosaur would have stood or walked. Based on scientists' knowledge of anatomy and the weight of dinosaur bones, they've come to the conclusion that most dinosaurs had tails that stuck straight out, and provided balance while holding their heads and upper bodies in a forward (not upright!) position. Curiosity Machine: Build a Balanced Dinosaur from AnnMarie Ppl Then we took a wide variety of materials, including toilet paper tubes, cardboard, tape, plastic straws, pipe cleaners, and a few colorful and fun materials like feathers and googly eyes, and made dinosaurs that stood at least 6" ta...

  Everybody knows magnets are FUN, but did you know scientists use magnets when making certain kinds of polymers?  Did you know that magnets can help chemists to sort out the tangled mess of molecules that most polymers consist of? Today's Curiosity Machine class focused on Making a Self-Assembling Structure using magnets, but the class wasn't just about magnets. One kind of self-assembling structure is a polymer, a long chain of repeating molecules that bind to create one super-strong molecule. We learned about polymers and a bit about atomic structure, then we turned our attention to magnets and to making our own structures that would link together using magnetic force. First, watch this video to get the highlights of our class: Here are my slides with recommended books for further reading: Curiosity Machine: Magnet Structures! from AnnMarie Ppl Here are some of those books: We had the table set up with dice of all kinds, pencils, paper, tape disp...