Category Archives: Kids and science

Friday Sprog Blogging: the rock cycle.

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The younger Free-Ride offspring shares a diagram from school.

The Rock Cycle

As promised, much of the science so far this school year has been earthy, and part of that is learning where rocks come from. (No, it’s not the stork.)

Sedimentary and Metamorphic

Different kinds of rocks, of course, have different origins. They also present different spelling challenges. (Yes, I’m looking at you, “metamorfic”.)

Igneous and Sediments

I kind of want to ask if there was a discussion about the size cutoff between a sedimentary rock and a sediment. (What’s the biggest you could get and still be a sediment? What’s the smallest clump of compressed sediments that you’d count as a rock?) But my offspring inform me that this kind of request that they spell out distinctions makes me sound like a philosopher or something.

Molten rock

Molten rock is always the prettiest.

But, I’ll confess, I look at all the forces at the center of this schematic of the rock cycle:

Prevailing forces

and I feel a lot of empathy for the rocks. I think these are some of the same forces acting upon me this semester.

Holy mole-y, it’s National Chemistry Week!

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Your humble blogger is swamped with work, but National Chemistry Week (October 17-23) waits for no overworked academic. So, let me offer a nugget from deep in the archives about why I dig chemistry.

What’s so great about chemistry? Of course, if you’re a kid, chemistry has the allure of magic — something might explode! (For those averse to permanent damage, there are plenty of cool chemistry activities that are much safer than whatever my brother did with his store-bought chemistry set to scorch the hell out of our parents’ card table.) But I suspect its real charm for students, at least when it’s taught right, is that it’s a science that looks for the “whys” pretty early in the game. In general, introductory chemistry doesn’t involve much memorization (whether of equations, as in physics, or of Linnaean taxonomy, cell organelles, phases of mitosis, or any of the other important details one has to remember in a biology class). Rather, you learn how to use the Periodic Table almost like a decoder ring to figure out why various substances behave the way they do. From the very beginning, the chemistry student is thinking not just in terms of facts, but in terms of rationalizing those facts. For every weird exception you learn to a regular pattern, the challenge is to understand why it breaks the pattern.

In this chemical universe the student enters, things start to make sense in a way that everyday life hardly ever does. It can be downright seductive. But of course, the orderly chemical universe to which the student is exposed is the product of much labor in laboratories. What happens in the labs can seem chaotic rather than orderly, and sometimes it is only the determination of the chemists to find the underlying order that keeps the going back to the bench to tame the chaos. Needless to say, finding the order in chaos can be seductive, too.

While chemistry often gets props for being a practical subject to pursue (where “practical” usually means leading to gainful employment, and the contrast class is something like philosophy), a lot of the people I know who went into chemistry were led by their hearts more than their heads. Chemistry just felt like the right way to engage with the world.

Primo Levi expressed this as well as anyone else has. Writing about his experiences as a chemistry student in Italy during the rise of Fascism on the eve of World War II, he said he felt

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …

[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers

(The Periodic Table, pp. 45-46.)

Why does it choke me up to see Levi want to conquer matter by understanding it, or to see that his motivation to understand matter is a desire to understand the universe and himself? Coming at a science like this, you can see why a couple centuries ago it was called natural philosophy. As nuts and bolts as the work of a chemist can be — and Levi was for most of his career a chemist who took on problems in different industrial labs, including an IG-Farben lab while he was a prisoner at Auschwitz — the drive here is to understand the substance of reality, to get at knowledge we can be sure of and can hold in common with others. Wanting something like this — to understand of the universe we’re in and how we fit into it, to share our experience with our fellow human beings — feels like the most human of impulses. Science is not the show-offy acting out of the maladjusted braniac, but the labor of the human spirit.

Maybe if more of that got across to science students, and to the public at large, cultivating scientific literacy wouldn’t seem so much like taking a dose of castor oil.

Friday Sprog Blogging: visual traces of science-y thoughts.

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The Free-Rides have been a tad busy (and sneezy, and coughy) this week, which has rather cut into our time for science-focused conversation. However, I was able to extract a couple of drawings from the Free-Ride offspring this morning.

From the elder Free-Ride offspring:

Blowfish

It is possible that the current interest in blowfish is related to neurotoxins, rather than just mechanisms for inflation. (Given that I make my own decaf, I’m not going to let this worry me just yet.)

From the younger Free-Ride offspring:

I’ve been told that the object emerging from the volcano is an atom. If so, obviously it’s not drawn to scale. Also, I suppose I should note that it’s the younger Free-Ride offspring who has been dealing with violent sneezing and coughing this week, which may have played some role in inspiring the subject matter for this drawing (although the camping trip to Lassen at the end of the summer probably had just as much to do with that).

DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students Drive 2010.

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Note to longtime readers: This post borrows heavily from posts I have written for past DonorsChoose drives. If you get a feeling of deja vu reading it, you’ve come by it honestly.

In the science-y sectors of the blogosphere, folks frequently bemoan the sorry state of the public’s scientific literacy and engagement. People fret about whether our children are learning what they should about science, math, and critical reasoning. Netizens speculate on the destination of the handbasket in which we seem to be riding.

In light of the big problems that seem insurmountable, we should welcome the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact.

This year, from October 10th through November 9th, a number of science bloggers, whether networked, loosely affiliated, or proudly independent, will be teaming up with DonorsChoose in a philanthropic throwdown for public schools.

DonorsChoose is a site where public school teachers from around the U.S. submit requests for specific needs in their classrooms — from books to science kits, overhead projectors to notebook paper, computer software to field trips — that they can’t meet with the funds they get from their schools (or from donations from their students’ families). Then donors choose which projects they’d like to fund and then kick in the money, whether it’s a little or a lot, to help a proposal become a reality.

Over the last few years, bloggers have rallied their readers to contribute what they can to help fund classroom proposals through DonorsChoose, especially proposals for projects around math and science, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, funding hundreds of classroom projects, and impacting thousands of students.

Which is great. But there are a whole lot of classrooms out there that still need help.

As economic experts scan the horizon for hopeful signs and note the harbingers of economic recovery, we should not forget that school budgets are still hurting (and are worse, in many cases, than they were last school year, since one-time lumps of stimulus money are gone now). Indeed, public school teachers have been scraping for resources since long before Wall Street’s financial crisis started. Theirs is a less dramatic crisis than a bank failure, but it’s here and it’s real and we can’t afford to wait around for lawmakers on the federal or state level to fix it.

The kids in these classrooms haven’t been making foolish investments. They’ve just been coming to school, expecting to be taught what they need to learn, hoping that learning will be fun. They’re our future scientists, doctors, teachers, decision-makers, care-providers, and neighbors. To create the scientifically literate world we want to live in, let’s help give these kids the education they deserve.

One classroom project at a time, we can make things better for these kids. Joining forces with each other people, even small contributions can make a big difference.

The challenge this year runs October 10 through November 9. We’re overlapping with Earth Science Week (October 10-16, 2010) and National Chemistry Week (October 17-23, 2010), a nice chance for earth science and chemistry fans to add a little philanthropy to their celebrations. There are a bunch of Scientopia bloggers mounting challenges this year (check out some of their challenge pages on our leaderboard), as well as bloggers from other networks (which you can see represented on the challenge’s motherboard). And, since today is the official kick-off, there is plenty of time for other bloggers and their readers to enter the fray!


How It Works:
Follow the links above to your chosen blogger’s challenge on the DonorsChoose website.

Pick a project from the slate the blogger has selected. Or more than one project, if you just can’t choose. (Or, if you really can’t choose, just go with the “Give to the most urgent project” option at the top of the page.)

Donate.

(If you’re the loyal reader of multiple participating blogs and you don’t want to play favorites, you can, of course, donate to multiple challenges! But you’re also allowed to play favorites.)
DonorsChoose will send you a confirmation email. Hold onto it; some bloggers (including me) will be offering donors nifty prizes. Details about the prizes and how to get them will be posted here soon!

Sit back and watch the challenges inch towards their goals, and check the leaderboards to see how many students will be impacted by your generosity.

Even if you can’t make a donation, you can still help!
Spread the word about these challenges using web 2.0 social media modalities. Link your favorite blogger’s challenge page on your MySpace page, or put up a link on Facebook, or FriendFeed, or LiveJournal (or Friendster, or Xanga, or …). Tweet about it on Twitter. Sharing your enthusiasm for this cause may inspire some of your contacts who do have a little money to get involved and give.

Here’s the permalink to my giving page.

I’ll be sharing links to other giving pages, plus details about some fabulous “thank you” prizes, soon. Thanks in advance for your generosity.

Friday Sprog Blogging: rabbit behavior.

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The elder Free-Ride offspring has been spending enough time with Snowflake Free-Ride to have become something of a “rabbit whisperer”. Snowflake herself seems preternaturally aware of when the elder sprog is in range, not to mention very assertive that the in-range sprog must have an audience with Her Royal Fuzziness.

So, it’s working out well for both of them at the moment.

We’ve been talking with the elder Free-Ride offspring about the extent to which Snowflake’s behaviors are being shaped by her interaction with the elder sprog. After one of these discussions, the elder Free-Ride offspring jotted down the following behavioral notes:

Normal:

  • Eats poo.
  • Shakes herself when I stop petting her.
  • Grooms herself when I’m not watching.
  • Very calm when I pet her.

Social:

  • Gnawing at the bars of her run to get to me.

Dr. Free-Ride: What did you mean by normal behaviors?

Elder offspring: Stuff that she probably would have done even if I hadn’t come into her life.

Dr. Free-Ride: How do you know know she grooms herself when you’re not looking?

Elder offspring: Because she grooms herself when she thinks I’m not looking, then stops abruptly when she senses my presence.

Dr. Free-Ride: You didn’t include anything about her nighttime routine (or her morning routine).

Elder offspring: I don’t think that really counts, because I’ve trained her to hop into her hutch for some carrots at night so I can lock her in.

Dr. Free-Ride: So the fact that you’ve trained her make it your behavior, not hers?

Elder offspring: It’s the behavior that I’ve trained her to exhibit. I also trained her to use the paw to push open the hutch door when I unlatch it in the morning.

Dr. Free-Ride: I know you’ve been trying to train her to exhibit some other behavior, and sometimes she has her own ideas about what behavior to exhibit.

Elder offspring: I’ve been trying to train her to come out of the run and sit on my lap for noms and pats. So far, she usually just puts two paws on my lap, then goes back into the run. And when I use carrot sticks instead of whole carrots, she steals them and goes back into the run to eat them.

Dr. Free-Ride: Why do you think she’s resistant to being a lap bunny?

Elder offspring: Maybe she’s still a little afraid of the outside. Maybe she doesn’t want to be a lap bunny.

Dr. Free-Ride: Has Snowflake trained you to do anything?

Elder offspring: Other than giving her carrots and pats, I don’t think so.

Friday Sprog Blogging: Kids Day at SLAC 2010 and monster muscles.

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Today, the younger Free-Ride offspring’s account of another workshop from Kids Day @ SLAC 2010.

Dr. Free-Ride: What did you do for the levers part of the day?

Younger offspring: Levers and pulleys? Well, they put us into three groups, after we went to another part — it was in the same building, but we had to walk, so we went to the levers and pulleys. They put us into groups of three.

Dr. Free-Ride: And?

Younger offspring: And I was in the group where first, we got to sit in the chair, put our legs up, wear gloves and safety goggles also, and pull ourselves up.

Dr. Free-Ride: How high?

Younger offspring: Up to the red tape on the rope.

Dr. Free-Ride: Uh huh. How high was that, would you estimate? Was it pretty far up?

Younger offspring: Two or three feet, I think.

Dr. Free-Ride: That’s significant. That’s enough that if you fell from that height you would feel it.

Younger offspring: No, but we were sitting on a chair.

Dr. Free-Ride: I understand.

Younger offspring: And we kept our legs up, so then we let go slowly and let our hands slip down.

Dr. Free-Ride: Mmm hmm.

Younger offspring: It made it feel warm but it didn’t make it have a burn.

Dr. Free-Ride: Uh huh. Friction, baby!

Younger offspring: Don’t say that! I’m not a baby!

Dr. Free-Ride: I didn’t mean it that way. OK, go on. What else did you guys do with the levers and the pulleys?

Younger offspring: Well, for the levers, there was, like, one person standing on one side — a grown-up standing on one side, and it was on the blue tape, which meant “one”. The blue tape was in the middle. So, I was on the other side, and I even walked to the edge and it wouldn’t work, so I was like, “Move it to two.”

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm.

Younger offspring: The green tape. So, we moved it to two. He stood on the edge and I stood, like, not on the edge. I was like this (trying to push down), and he was like, “Nope.” And I moved back and moved back until I was on the edge, and he was like, “You did it!” Or something like that.

Dr. Free-Ride: OK, so basically you moved further and further back on the lever and then you were able to lift a grown-up.

Younger offspring: I have something it connects with, kind of. In martial arts.

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes?

Younger offspring: When sensei gets a sword —

Dr. Free-Ride: Uh huh?

Younger offspring: A foam sword.

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes.

Younger offspring: He swings it, and he tells us not to go near the end, ’cause the end’s faster and it will hit you if you go near the wall, where he is.

Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, so if you’re going to get hit by it, it’s better to get hit by it closer to the the handle than to the end?

Younger offspring: No! You’re not going to get hit by it. It’s a timing practice.

Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, it’s a timing practice.

Younger offspring: You have to time when you’re going, and he says, if you don’t want to get hit, go near the shoulder.

Dr. Free-Ride: Got it, because it’s moving slower there.

Younger offspring: When he’s like this — he’s swinging his arm, like this — and when he goes right here —

Dr. Free-Ride: When it goes near the shoulder.

Younger offspring: When it goes right here — that’s where you are — when it goes right here, you walk past and around him so you won’t get hit.

Dr. Free-Ride: And get near the shoulder rather then going out near the end.

Younger offspring: No, and also getting close to him. You go like this once you get past the shoulder.

Dr. Free-Ride: So you go right around his back. OK.

Younger offspring: So you have to go close to him.

Dr. Free-Ride: That’s very smart. That’s a good connection to make. So was there anything else awesome in the levers and pulleys part of the Kids Day that you want to tell us about?

Younger offspring: There was also a tug-of-war.

Dr. Free-Ride: Mmm hmm.

Younger offspring: And if you were on the side that was the winning side, it was because there was a pulley.

Dr. Free-Ride: Oh.

Younger offspring: That’s why you could beat a grown-up at a tug-of-war.

Dr. Free-Ride: Awesome.

Younger offspring: And it was called “Monster Muscles!”

Dr. Free-Ride: Were there actual monsters involved, or were you the —

Younger offspring: No!

Dr. Free-Ride: You were the monsters?

Younger offspring: No! We had muscles, like monsters’ muscles. We had big muscles!

Dr. Free-Ride: I see. Or was it just that you were making smart use of the muscles you had?

Younger offspring: No, we had monster muscles. We got to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps!

Dr. Free-Ride: But was that not just clever mechanical use of the muscles you came with? Or did they really inject monster DNA into you to make your muscles somehow magically stronger?

Younger offspring: Does it matter?

Dr. Free-Ride: I think to Sprog Blog readers it might matter.

Younger offspring: OK, then, Sprog Bloggers. You guys … I am not going to tell you. I don’t know what she just said. OK? Do you hear me? Do you hear me, DrugMonkey? Do you hear me, Isis?

Dr. Free-Ride: OK, bye.

Younger offspring: Bye!

Friday Sprog Blogging: outside of a rabbit.

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Outside of a rabbit, a book is a sprog’s best friend. Inside of a rabbit, it’s too dark to read.*

The elder Free-Ride offspring has been spending the majority of free moments with Snowflake Free-Ride, a New Zealand White rabbit. Today, the elder Free-Ride offspring presented me with a sketch of Snowflake, labeled with her parts:

External Rabbit Anatomy

Do you get the feeling that the elder Free-Ride offspring has observed this rabbit from many angles?

Rabbit detail 1

Coming and going?

Rabbit detail 3

Yeah, me too.

Rabbit detail 2

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you have any interest in drawing the internal anatomy of a rabbit.

Elder offspring: (with a look of disbelief) No.

Dr. Free-Ride: I didn’t mean of Snowflake’s internal anatomy!

Elder offspring: OK.

Dr. Free-Ride: I mean, I think you might find it fascinating. We could probably find some rabbit anatomical diagrams online.

Elder offspring: I just ate a quesadilla twenty minutes ago. Maybe after school.

Rabbit detail 4
_______
*Clearly, I’m ripping off Groucho Marx here, although he said it with a dog and a man. (And with glasses and a mustache, neither of which I am sporting at the moment.)

Friday Sprog Blogging: the glorious return of the science fair!

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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.

Friday Sprog Blogging: The new school year.

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It’s been a bit of a week here, partly owing to the crush of the Free-Ride offspring’s new school year. (I suppose, since it started in the middle of last week, it’s better described as a newish school year.)

The sprogs (and their parents) have been sufficiently busy that we haven’t yet had an extended discussion about the academic year that stretches before us. However, I was able to extract a bit of information from the elder Free-Ride offspring about the focus of the sixth grade science curriculum.

Earth Science

The sixth grade will, apparently, be studying Earth Science. According to the list the elder Free-Ride offspring dashed off for me, this will include such topics as volcanoes, weather, rocks, and ecosystems.

And there will be sixth grade science camp.

I do not know if they will get around to discussing what gravitational forces might explain the shape of the Earth in the picture above. I do know that the elder Free-Ride offspring’s teacher this year majored in biology.

I’m thinking that if things ever get less hectic, this could be a pretty good year.

Friday Sprog Blogging: Kids Day at SLAC 2010 and magnets.

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The younger Free-Ride offspring continues recapping Kids Day @ SLAC 2010 with a report on another workshop:

Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me about the magnets at Kids Day.

Younger offspring: Well, the magnets … first we got to make our own magnets, and we had a piece of steel or something — a bar of steel. We wrapped a lot of wire around it; the two ends were sticking out. We also got a battery with it, with two chicken clips.

Dr. Free-Ride: OK. We used to call them alligator clips, but I understand that reptiles and birds have a common ancestor, so chicken clips works.

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