At least, the Free-Ride offspring’s elementary school thinks it has money in the budget for a science fair this Spring. Sure, I know that grown-up science is frequently constrained by a rapidly changing funding landscape, but I’m not sure that including this element of scientific activity is what will catch a kid’s imagination.
Anyway, I asked the sprogs to jot down their current thoughts on what they might want to do for the science fair this year. Here’s what they gave me.
The elder Free-Ride offspring (now in sixth grade) hasn’t really latched on to one idea yet. The current list of options reads as follows (with my commentary in square brackets):
- Which food does Snow like best? [We definitely need to read up on the rules about observational studies of domestic animals in science fairs. As well, this kernel of a project idea requires some careful thinking about controls.]
- Snails or slugs: which are more efficient? [Efficient at what, wonders Dr. Free-Ride.]
- Which is more viscous, honey or syrup? [I reckon we’d need a few more substances in the comparison. Plus some exploration of what it is about each substance that makes it more or less viscous.]
- Trick people’s palates! [Intriguing! But also cryptic. Is this going to be about food chemistry, or tastebuds, or psychology?]
- How heat affects bunny naps. [Again, we need to get right with the rules on animal observational studies. And we may be running out of really warm days to use as data points.]
The younger Free-Ride offspring (now in fourth grade) has been gravitating toward an idea inspired by a family camping trip at Lassen Volcanic National Park:
Working with sulfur.
Found in Sulfur Works, Bumpass Hell, & Devil’s Kitchen [all sites at Lassen].
What do you have to do to make sulfur smell like rotten eggs?
Can we find sulfur in foods we have in the house (besides eggs)? How could we get the sulfur out?
What happens if we put wet soil and trapped steam (don’t know how) in a bowl, then put sulfur soil (ground sulfur to a powder) on the top layer?
This could be really interesting … but I’m wondering now if our kitchen is going to need a fume hood.
Stay tuned.
Re tricking people’s palates: A classmate of mine did her science fair project on just that. She made colored-flavored sugar cookies. In some cases the flavor was matched with the color traditionally associated with it (mint with green, orange with orange) sometimes not (mint flavor in orange cookie, orange flavor in green cookie). She then ran many taste tests and analyzed how the color affected the tasters ability to identify the flavor. Interesting how much visual cues affected taste. My science fair project was about analyzing time of trees’ first blooms in relation to temperatures and length of days. No, I didn’t have to make the long-term observations; I had access to decades of data on all three variables (dates of blooming by species, daily temperature data, and sunrise/sunset data) from a friend’s dad who worked at NOAA. Even then I made science be about history. Certain trees bloomed when the days reached a certain length, others waited ‘til there had been a certain number of days above a certain temp. I wonder what is the better survival strategy, particularly with changing climate. I’m sure there’s even more data accumulated by now and probably more easily available too.
The tricking could also include things like “Chemical Apple Pie”, which tastes exactly like apple pie even though it doesn’t have even a single apple in it.
(Don’t worry, it’s just a name. The main flavour ingredient is cinnamon.)