Category Archives: Kids and science

Friday Sprog Blogging: one of *those* Fridays.

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This week’s sprog blog will be delayed on account of the younger Free-Ride offspring had so much school work to do last night, and then again early this morning, that you’d think the kid was trying to get a grant proposal submitted. (A salient difference is that probably most grant proposals submitted to NSF or NIH don’t require the use of a hot glue gun.)

Anyhow, given that the most recent discussions with the younger Free-Ride offspring have focused on time management (see above) and have involved more gnashing of teeth than witty repartee, this is your chance to weigh in on what conversation I should have, with either or both of the Free-Ride offspring, and then report here on the blog before the weekend is out.

Some possible contenders:

  • The younger Free-Ride offspring’s ideas for science fair projects. There’s been some discussion about figuring out a clever experiment to measure the limits of successful multitasking (at least in the population at Casa Free-Ride). Limits of memory (and especially, what kinds of things are most readily forgotten — project due dates, I’m looking at you) might also be a possibility. Otherwise the younger Free-Ride offspring wants to grow mold.
  • The elder Free-Ride offspring will be starting junior high next school year (yikes!). This means that Dr. Free-Ride’s better half went to the parent orientation at the junior high and was given a booklet on how to keep your kids safe (from cyberbullying, sexting, and the like) online. Within our draconian house limits on screentime, the elder Free-Ride offspring manages to be online a lot. I imagine this 11-year-old netizen may have some interesting views on the perspectives presented in the booklet.
  • We could also talk about why the sprogs never help me grade papers.

Sorry for the delay. We’ll get you some sproggy goodness before the next work week starts.

Friday Sprog Blogging: choosing sides.

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The Free-Ride offspring have been hunkered down with their school work (not to mention wondering whether their soccer practices this week will be called off due to … snow?), but they took the time to dash off some drawings to suggest where the parts of their minds devoted to science are lately.

The younger Free-Ride offspring followed radio reports of Watson and its wild success on Jeopardy.

Bender versus Watson

Regular readers may recall that the younger Free-Ride offspring is a fan of Bender. Naturally, therefore, the younger Free-Ride offspring would like to see Bender face off against Watson. Verily, the younger Free-Ride offspring would like to see Bender crush Watson in a battle of artificial intellects.

We are still searching for the Jeopardy category where this is likely to happen. Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, the elder Free-Ride offspring contemplates the science fair, and imagines more active participation from the proposed animal subject:

Snowflake versus the Internets

In the picture, Snowflake is reading what some yahoo has apparently written on the internet: “… Which proves that bunnies could never understand the importance of science.”

Snowflake’s response (which I can only imagine was preceded by a snort): “My big fluffy bunny butt.”

(It would appear that Snowflake is clutching an Eppendorf tube in her left forepaw.)

If it does snow here this weekend, we’ll check back in to share the apocalypse with you.

Friday Sprog Blogging: science fair experimental design.

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The elder Free-Ride offspring is thinking about a project studying the behavior of Snowflake Free-Ride, the rabbit in residence at Casa Free-Ride. While finding interesting questions to ask about the bunny is pretty easy, working out reasonable ways to get data that might help answer those questions is somewhat harder:

Elder offspring: I want to see whether Snowflake finds food with her eyes or her nose.

Dr. Free-Ride: What are your thoughts on how to do that?

Elder offspring: Well, we need a room …

Dr. Free-Ride: … OK. Tell me more.

Elder offspring: We need a room with a fan up at the top.

Dr. Free-Ride: Why do we need a fan up at the top?

Elder offspring: To blow away the smells.

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. So you’re looking for some mechanism to mask smells and see if she can still find the food.

Elder offspring: Yes.

Dr. Free-Ride: I guess I’m not totally convinced a fan is the best way to mask a smell. Also, I worry that it might freak her out.

Elder offspring: Oh.

Dr. Free-Ride: Well, your hypothesis is that she’s either finding the food by smell or by sight. So how would you tell if sight is what she’s using?

Elder offspring: We start the fan and put the food there and if she can find it … We may also need to use a clothespin, like in those cartoons —

Dr. Free-Ride: We’re totally not putting a clothespin on the rabbit’s nose, smart aleck!

Elder offspring: (snickering) I know.

Dr. Free-Ride: Let’s back up a little bit. We’re talking about two possible ways you think the rabbit could locate food — one is by vision, one is by smell. Masking smell means we have to figure out a way to get the volatile stuff that the nose detects away from her. But my own hunch is that masking sight might be easier. Do you have any thoughts on how to mask —

Elder offspring: Blindfolds.

Dr. Free-Ride: Uh, no. You’ll have to be more clever, since you can’t blindfold the bunny.

Elder offspring: Put her in a dark room.

Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know how good her night vision is. (Or how good your night vision is if you’re in the dark room trying to observe her.)

Elder offspring: If we hear munching …

Dr. Free-Ride: Isn’t she always munching on something?

Elder offspring: We’d use a food where the munching sounds like crunching.

Dr. Free-Ride: Aside from utter darkness, can you think of any other way to mask visual contact with the food?

Elder offspring: What if we surround a carrot by things that are visually distracting?

Dr. Free-Ride: Does that really test whether she’s using vision to find the carrot, or whether she can pick it out visually amongst a bunch of visually distracting things? Maybe you need to think about whether there’s some way to disguise it looking like a carrot, but it would still be there for her to smell.

Elder offspring: How about we put it behind a curtain or something?

Dr. Free-Ride: Ah, a barrier that keeps her from seeing it. Then, with the carrot out of sight but in smelling range, you’d see if she reacted like, “Where’s the carrot. GIMME THE CARROT!”

Elder offspring: Yeah.

Dr. Free-Ride: OK, that seems like a key part of your experimental design: how exactly are you going to mask the carrot’s visibility but not its smell?

Elder offspring: Invisibility cloak!

Dr. Free-Ride: You don’t get to use things that don’t exist in your science fair project. Unless you can successfully invent them, in which case — if you can successfully invent an invisibility cloak, I submit to you that that would probably be a more impressive science fair project than this information on rabbit behavior that you obtain using the invisibility cloak.

Elder offspring: Yeah, OK.

Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, is it going to be a problem that you have exactly one rabbit to study?

Elder offspring: Nah.

Dr. Free-Ride: What’s that going to do to the conclusions you can draw.

Elder offspring: I probably can’t say that all rabbits are like this based on the behavior of this one rabbit. But, she’s a pretty typical rabbit.

Dr. Free-Ride: How do you know she’s pretty typical?

Elder offspring: Because, she’s a breed [New Zealand white] that’s raised for lab use, and they want typical animals for lab use.

Dr. Free-Ride: Which means you would be surprised if she were very weird, as rabbits go?

Elder offspring: Yes.

Dr. Free-Ride: Of course, she’s been living with you for almost a year now. That might be enough to make a rabbit weird.

Elder offspring: Hey!

Dr. Free-Ride: I’m just saying. So, back to your experimental design, since Snowflake is a smart rabbit — she learns stuff — what if you make a curtain or some other barrier and she starts associating it with carrots?

Elder offspring: Maybe sometimes we could just put a rock behind it instead of a carrot.

Dr. Free-Ride: Good call — something that isn’t edible and doesn’t smell like a treat.

Friday Sprog Blogging: comfort food.

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We had to fetch the younger Free-Ride offspring from school yesterday midday on account of an unscheduled bout of vomiting.* Because, you know, the microbes and immune systems tend not to take account of things like our work schedules. (“Or whether we have a science test,” the younger Free-Ride offspring chimes in.)

Anyway, since experience has established me as the puke-parent** in the Free-Ride household (the one upon whom a child will vomit in instances where someone is vomited upon), I now have something of a procedure when I get home with a pukey kid. We cover the head of the bed, the pillow, and the floor area adjacent to the child’s bed with towels (since, in case of puke, it’s easier to remove and replace a towel or two than to strip the whole bed and change the sheets). We provide a nice big aluminum bowl next to the bed … just in case.

And we don’t even think about putting food into that tummy until the tummy shows no signs of erupting.

But then, what to put in the tummy — what counts as a “gentle” food for a kid recovering from a stomach bug — is a source of some controversy at Casa Free-Ride.

In the household in which I grew up, flat ginger ale and saltines were the canonical first foods after an upchuck. If they stayed down, maybe 24 hours later you’d get to try some baked custard, the eventually “real” food.

Sadly, we hardly ever have ginger ale in the house, and the Free-Ride offspring have declared saltines strange and disgusting. What this means is that I don’t have a well-established safe food with which to test tummy stability.

Indeed, as I was laying down towels, right before I was going to make a batch of baked custard, the younger Free-Ride offspring mentioned that a teacher at the after school program had said that eggs (an ingredient of baked custard) are not a good food for your tummy after vomiting.

This suggests to us that what people consider as the right kind of food to give a kid who’s been throwing up must be pretty strongly shaped by what kind of food they were given as kids trying to get better from crummy tummies. Also, it suggests that there is no clear unified theory of the optimal macronutrient composition for these foods — at least not one upon which a clear majority of grown-ups taking care of these kids agree.

My strategy, drawn from my childhood, has been: fluids with a little flavor (because water tastes funny when you’re sick), then carbohydrates with negligible fiber (the dreaded saltines), then some not-too-wobbly protein, and none of it very far from a flavor range it would be fair to describe as “bland”. Probably a banana somewhere in there, too.

But, see, now the younger Free-Ride offspring and I are wondering if this strategy is bunkum.***

So, because the younger Free-Ride offspring tells me that a PubMed search would not be a relaxing way to spend a sick day, we’re appealing to those more likely to have an actual evidence base here (Pal? Pascale? Other medical/nutrition types?) to tell us whether there is any informed-by-science consensus on what a kid ought to be fed (and in what sequence) once the puking subsides.

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* No, we don’t have scheduled vomiting. It’s just that these stomach bugs hardly ever happen on a day when we had nothing else to do.

** The companion role to “puke-parent” is “poop-parent”. My better-half assumed that role, but hasn’t gotten any action in it since the sprogs were in diapers.

*** My current favorite alternate theory on why to eat bland foods in the wake of a stomach-bug: You don’t want to eat foods with more interesting flavors and textures, especially foods you really like, and then throw them up (if you’ve tested the tummy too soon) lest you develop a long-lasting aversion to those foods. It took me maybe a decade to get over my aversion to spaghetti and other long pastas served with tomato-based sauces … because of a stomach flu when I was about 11. On the other hand, if you develop an aversion to saltines, it doesn’t really impact your quality of life in quite the same way.

Friday Sprog Blogging: the new science unit in four panels.

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The younger Free-Ride offspring’s class is apparently just about to move on from sediment-related issues and start a new science unit. Indeed, this week they even did an experiment as a preview of the new unit, which the younger Free-Ride offspring recounts with these four panels:

Static1

“First, blow up a balloon and tie it.”

Static2

“Then rub a wool cloth on it.”

Static3

“Finally, rub it against a wood cabinet.”

Static4

“And it stayes up.”

* * * * *

So, clearly the experiment was about static electricity, and we can look forward to more content on electricity (and probably magnetism) in the coming unit. And, I’m hopeful that there will be detailed discussion of some of the underlying physical structure that leads to these fun regularities in nature.

For instance, it would be cool if they talked about why charging a balloon enough to get it to cling to the cabinet or wall seems to be easier in winter. Why should cold, dry weather be better for generating a charge separation than warm, wet weather?

Using the wool cloth (as opposed to the hair on your head, like we did when I was a kid) is pretty fancy. If they examine the permutations of wool cloths and silk cloths rubbing glass rods and rubber rods, dare I hope that there will be some discussion of why certain materials are better at grabbing up electrons and others are better at depositing them?

(And just now, I’m wondering whether it’s a safe assumption that the fourth grade science class will even discuss electrons in the context of electricity.)

Also, why, in the fourth panel, does my childe spelle like Isaac Newton?

Friday Sprog Blogging: anthropomorphic earth science.

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As you may have guessed, I’ve been buried in work. (Maybe Khrushchev was talking to me?) Nonetheless, the Free-Ride offspring continue to go to school, to interact with the world, to learn stuff … and to represent much of it visually.

Here are some recent images from the younger Free-Ride offspring, who has been studying earth science in school this year. The first explains some salient facts about volcanoes:

Volcano

The text reads (starting with the block at the lower right corner and working counter-clockwise):

Pressure builds, pushing magma upward.

Magma pushes toward Earth’s surface through cracks.

Hot lava, gases, and rock flow from the volcano.

Lava cools, hardens, and becomes part of the land.

The other images are … let’s say less canonical:

EarthquakeMarriage1

An earthquake destroying a city is imagined as a “marriage gone bad”. The quarreling spouses are, apparently, plates on either side of the San Andreas fault. (Ironically, the divorce lawyers in the audience will be quick to note that California is a no-fault state.)

The text reads:

Fact: land plates rub or slide past each other to create an earthquake.

The story: No one came to the landplates’ wedding, so they want to share it with everyone. Marriage failed!

The next image continues the story:

EarthquakeMarriage2

Fact: Earthquakes or volcanoes can make rock or mud slide down a steep slope, damaging a lot of things.

The Earthquake went for miles … Just enough to roll away the baby.

It should be noted that mother Earth looks sad that baby boulder is sliding away.

Finally, a rather more anthropomorphic version of the water cycle than I’m used to seeing:

EarthSciSimpsons

The text reads:

Ice cube of Bart.

Sun Homer kills him and gives the corpse to cloud Marge.

She rains and gives birth to puddle Maggie.

Yeah, I don’t know where this stuff comes from either.

Friday Sprog Blogging: Dinosaurs Life Size.

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Dinosaurs Life Size

This week, the sprogs had a look at Dinosaurs Life Size by Darren Naish.

The Free-Ride offspring are, at eleven and nine, some years past maximum dinosaur enthusiasm.

Still, they have an appreciation for arresting pictures, interesting facts, and the scientific detective work that goes into reconstructing the details of dinosaurs’ anatomies and ways of life from the clues lurking in fossil remains.

The younger Free-Ride offspring says:

There are a lot of fossils in this book. How do you get those life size photos of dinosaurs?

I think it’s really cool how Liopleurodons left bite marks in fossils.

Dino Eye

Sauroposeidon has huge eyes because of a huge face. And its name means “earthquake god lizard.”

My four-year-old cousin would enjoy a lot of these dinosaurs. He’d like how huge they are. And, he’d learn lots of facts about them. He’d learn where they were found in the world and how big they were.

The elder Free-Ride offspring says:

I found this book a bit monotonous and repetitive, mostly because I think it was written for a much younger audience. I think a 6-year-old or 7-year-old would really enjoy this book.

Dino Fold Out Flap

They would like the fold out flaps.

The book doesn’t really show skeletons, maybe because little kids would find them “scary”.

Dino with Kid for Scale

The book has nice computer generated pictures of dinosaurs. There are also photos of little kids making faces placed with the dinosaur pictures, creating the illusion of dinosaurs still being alive today.

The book has an interesting way of demonstrating the size of the dinosaurs, picking a body part to show “life size”.

There are lots of cool facts (like the fact that Iguanodon’s thumb was a remarkable weapon).

There’s also a dinosaur quiz in the back of the book (but it’s WAY to easy for a sixth grader).

Friday Sprog Blogging scary repost: bloody minded.

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There are plenty of thrills and chills around Casa Free-Ride these days. Sadly, most of them involve stacks of exams and the horrifying spectacle of a wordy nine-year-old trying to write a concise summary of a 28 chapter book. While we get our diabolical workloads under control, here’s a post from the archives appropriate to the spooky season:

Elder offspring: Blood is cool.

Younger offspring: (Covering head with blanket) I hate blood, because I hate owies!

Dr. Free-Ride: But your blood does all sorts of good things for your body. You know that you’re filled with blood, right?

Elder offspring: Actually, your body is two-thirds water.

Dr. Free-Ride: And what do you think there’s lots of in blood?

Elder offspring: Oh yeah, water.

Younger offspring: I hate blood. I wish I didn’t have any.

Dr. Free-Ride: You need it to get oxygen to all the parts of the body.

Younger offspring: No I don’t, I’ll just breathe harder.

* * * * *
The sprogs recommend:

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Kids and drugs: difficulty with definitions.

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I’ve become aware that discussions, both heated and measured, are raging in other parts of the blogosphere about the collisions between drug law, educational initiatives, and governmental agencies responsible for looking out for the welfare of children (e.g., see here, here, and here.) At the moment, looking at hundreds of papers to grade, a soccer game to coach, and a bunch of other tasks that will be significantly harder to complete (but that must be completed within the next few days), I am not jumping into that fray.

However, it did put me in mind of some of the ways our parenting has interacted with the elementary school’s programing, including Red Ribbon Week, an anti-drug educational initiative that generally falls shortly before Halloween (and, coincidentally, that often coincides with National Chemistry Week. Four years ago, when both Free-Ride offspring were in the lower grades, celebrating Red Ribbon Week mostly amounted to wearing sunglasses or crazy socks or whatever that day’s Red Ribbon “theme” called for. But there was also a wee bit of discussion in the classroom about drugs. As originally reported in this post, the Free-Ride parents decided to see what the sprogs had learned:

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