Search results matching tags 'science' and 'teaching science'

Science is sensuous

Anonymous — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:04:00 GMT

Many of my students are unaware they are being watched in class by critters other than teachers.

As a child gets up to sharpen her pencil, a salamander scurries back under a rock, a fish darts to the surface looking for food, a cockroach slides under some lettuce.

As they become aware, and they do over the months, they start to watch. They bang on the glass, overfeed the fish, feign fear of the cockroach.They fail to see how perceptive these critters are, at least for awhile, but over time start to get to know them.

I promise my kids very little at the beginning of the year except that they will know less in June than they do in September, that the natural world is bigger than they know, and that they are not just part of it, they belong to it.

This last part is a big deal.

***

If you do not know this world, the one that bathes us with oxygen, feeds us with grain and flesh, refreshes our thirst, you cannot love it.

And, for the most part, we don't.

If you hope to teach a child the abstract models needed for science, you best start by cultivating her love of the world instead of the sad task of earning good grades for the love of her parents.

Somewhere along the way, our children lose their way.
Somewhere along the way, we encouraged this.

We threaten our laggards with tales of woe should they fail to earn a diploma, a place on the honor roll, recognition as a National Merit Finalist. Children respond to fear, as we all do--it's what drives our politics and our economy.

Fear might generate enough engineers among us, but it does not create scientists.

***

You cannot love the natural world in the abstract; the natural world, by definition, is sensuous. We use abstract thought to make sense of the sensuous. That defines science.

If your child sees the beauty in Fibonacci numbers but fails to see the deeper beauty of a pine cone's spiral, you are raising a professional student, and we have more than enough of those.

If your child is "wasting" her time staring at a pine cone instead of logging hours of math homework to please the adults who keep her alive, she just might hold onto her curiosity and love of the world long enough to do something useful as an adult.

I am not saying learning math is useless--quite the contrary.

A child who loves the world develops a fondness for patterns, and will have a use for numbers.

Approximation to adequacy: why we hate science

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:21:00 GMT

The individual concepts of children, and the individual concepts of most persons who live and die in this world, are exceedingly vague, crude, and obscure. That is, they are vague, crude, and obscure in comparison with any approximation to adequacy.
Francis W. Parker, "Observation," Talks on Pedagogics, 1894

Leslie and I startled a black duck-like critter as we stepped over to the other side of a jetty. It scrabbled its way back to the water, its legs flailing against the sand. It had a bright orange-red beak, and it swam a lot better than it ran.

What was it? Not sure. We'll find out eventually by putting together its shape, color, location, season--all things recorded by others, things I can look up. Right now I suspect it was a black scoter. A few minutes on the internet, and I'll figure it out.

***

Science requires observation, of course, but it also requires a way to record those observations. Humans (and other mammals) when left on their own will see what they need to see. Context matters.

Writing things down matters more than we realize--we give life to words, because words make moments permanent. We can compare a moment we had two years ago with the one we have now. It turns out our words are less ~~fallible~~ malleable than our memories. Before the written word, our stories were certain and true.

Words make our stories more certain, and over time, less true. We trust the book (in whatever form) over our elders now, no small reason we have formalized our warehousing of the old. We no longer need the old folks for their collective memory, and books don't soil their beds.

***

Science works because the natural world follows consistent rules, and because those who practice science trust their written words over their intuitions. It still upsets me that an American dime (2.3 grams) falls as fast as the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (almost 3500 grams) when I drop both from about 8 feet on the first day of class.

They both hit the floor at the same time, every time.

I know that they will, but I still don't believe it. Cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance hurts, a lot, and for good reason. A mammal who hesitates, who is confused by competing interpretations of its environment, may soon end up in pieces, torn by the talons and teeth of a critter a bit more focused.

If my students aren't grabbing their brains complaining that all this science stuff hurts, then I'm not teaching science, I'm teaching trivia. I teach a lot of trivia.

Ripping away the comfort of cultural reality creeps people out. On a rare day, I'll see a glimpse of fear in a child's eye as she feels the floor drop under her feet. I won't push this, but I will acknowledge it--"the world is bigger than any of us can know" or maybe "welcome to science."

What I won't do is pretend it's not terrifying, this cognitive dissonance, bucking hundreds of millions of years of evolution that taught us to fear the shadows, fear the dissonance.

I'm sure a ~~English~~ Language Arts teacher sees the same when a child grasps that Gilgamesh shares his fears of death in a poem written almost 3,000 years ago. An art teacher sees the joy on a child's face as she recognizes the power of her hands and her imagination, so rarely expressed in a classroom.

None of us see it during review for the state tests.

Yes, I am working my way to this...
Thanks, Kate Tabor, for the book!

Quahogs, Darwin, and grace

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:26:00 GMT

Today is Darwin Day, honoring a complex man with a stunningly simpleidea that replaced the need for magical thinking.

Folks may hold on to their magic, I know I do, but they can no longer use rational thinking to hold on to the idea that the Hand of God was necessary to craft our appearance here.

The theory of evolution cannot disprove God—no science can.That was never Darwin’s intent.

See, if you grasp science, you grasp that it is not designedto disprove anything outside therealm of the natural world.

It’s not science using theology that causes all the trouble.It’s theology insisting that its stories are scientifically sound.

I like hot sauce and I like fruit, but I don't splash Tabasco on my blueberries.

I like fables, and I like science. I try not to confound the two.

***

Yesterday the soft gray wintry sky spit on the flint gray water. The air was chilly, but the water was still mid-40's, balmy for February.

Clamming in February, somewhere in Cape May County

I pulled just over a dozen quahogs out of the mixof muck and sand that gives them life. My hands were numb, too numb to feel the slice of flesh, but not so numb thatI could not feel the sure shape of a cherrystone nestled in my hand. Perfect.

The more you look at these critters, the more beautiful and sophisticated they appear.

I gently tucked the oldest one back into the muck, one much older than the students I teach. I also tossed back the smallest, not out of sentiment--the small ones are tasty--but out of respect for the law.

Within a few hours, what was left of them sat in our bellies.

***

Here's the thing about science, something Darwin knew, something too many today do not--something does not have to be empirically demonstrated and peer-reviewed to be true, even matters of the natural world.

The natural world exceeds our collective imagination. The science world is limited to the parts of the natural world we have bothered to see. Since what we bother to see is influenced heavily by the wages we get to see it, what we look at represents a tiny, biased view of our universe.

This is true of scientists, this s true of the clergy, this is true of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. It's also true of me, and (if I may be so presumptuous) you.

Pulling up a quahog from the muck on a wet wintry day interests me. Quahogs interest me enough to know, from personal study, that many of the chowder clams I toss back are older than me, no matter what science says.

If I had pursued science research as a career, I would not be playing with quahogs, I'd be playing with telomeres--not because telomeres are more interesting, but because telomeres may unlock the fountain of youth, and (subsequently and more importantly) have some heavy finanacial interests invested in them.

My sophomores feel this. What we call science in high school biology narrows their world view. Their wages (in this case grades) depend on reducing life to a series of incomprehensible and unpronounceable words attached to illustrations of things no human or mammal or any living thing at all has ever seen.

***

You can tell how old a clam is by checking its rings. I have seen several quahogs well into their 60's and 70's, and I mostly toss them back, again not (mostly) out of sentiment, but because they tend to be chewy.

If you Google northern quahog age you'll learn that until recently, "researchers" stated that the oldest northern quahogs were around 40. I knew otherwise, as does anyone else who bothers to gather clams in places too shallow for dredgers, but I lack the sophisticated "sclerochronological analysis" employed by scientists. I do have eyes, though, and a large sample size

An hour ago, they were still in the mud.

Less than a year ago, researchers discovered that my quahogs can live over a hundred years:

Annually resolved growth lines in the hinge region and margin of the shell were identified and counted; the age of the oldest clam shell was determined to be at least 106 y. This age represents a considerable increase in the known maximum life span for M. mercenaria, more than doubling the maximum recorded life span of the species (46 y).

Iain D. Ridgway et al.,"New Species Longevity Record for the Northern Quahog"Journal of Shellfish Research 30(1):35-38. 2011

I could roll my eyes, but this is how science works. And now the "known" recorded life span has more than doubled.

***

But this has always been true. Natural selection has always been true. Gravity has always been true. Our understanding is more recent.

What separates science from the rest of what we know is that it depends on faith in the natural world, and faith in the idea that certain patterns have always been true, and will remain true.

God may (or may not) be a human construct--there's no way to test this empirically, and because it's untestable, it's not only uninteresting to science, it can never be science.

When I feel the perfect heft of an ancient quahog in my hand on a mid-winter day,

when I become part of the gray light, part of the muddy smell,

when my edge of self blends in with the detritus of life in the chilly mud between my toes,

I am unconscious of the rational.

Mercenaria mercenaria, *** sapiens

I am also ridiculously happy, happy to be part of this thing, whatever this thing is, that connects me and the clams and everything that lives to a world we've done nothing to deserve.

Read Charles Darwin's words. Know that he was happiest when absorbing the incomprehensible variety of life around us, of us. The first love of his life left him because he preferred collecting bugs to meeting her family during winter break at college.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin.

Darwin did not kill God.
Those who persist in using science to prove God exists, though, just might.

Clam photos by us taken yesterday.
Yes, I know, I fubared the html--still working on it....

Little Scientists, Inc.

Anonymous — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:40:00 GMT

fet·ish/ˈfetiSH/
Noun:
An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
A course of action to which one has an excessive and irrational commitment.


Guess the goggles aren't needed for the pre-pubescent crew. That looks suspiciously like a carboy of homebrew sitting on the scientist's right.

Unless you give a child a reason to want to know something, to know the world, then getting them all gooey-eyed thinking that they love what passes for science in order to please mama is just cultivating a fetish.

If we continue to push science as a religion, a cult with idolized props--the lab coat, the goggles, the geek 'tude--used to induce awe through glorious displays, well, we'll keep getting what we've been getting. Before we can hope to create more scientists, we ought to focus on creating more thinkers.

I'd like to keep our fetishes in the boardroom and the chapel--both indoor places defined by humans, where magical attachment to objects (flow charts and holy books) enhances our worlds of magical thinking. Our magic worlds follow an internally consistent blend of logic and lust, that allows us to makes some sense of the universe on our terms.

Nature don't play that way.

While many of us have been vicariously living through Natalie and Justin and Prince Harry, a few have stumbled on amazing stuff. Photons erupting out of nothingness, neutrinos defying basic laws of the universe-- a very few among us giving us knowledge we'll probably misuse, again and again.

***

Science for children, for anyone, starts with the flick of a minnow's tail, a dragon fly cocking its head in a child's direction, with a mud pie that falls apart if too wet or if too dry. Before you can learn how to predict, you need to learn how to see.

You don't need iPads or Vernier probes or simulated computer programs. You don't need fancy "scientifical" equipment.You just need curious children (a redundancy), a door that lets children out as easily as it lets them in, and an interested adult or two to guide them..

We keep shoving kids in concrete buildings, away from their clan, away from Grandma's stories, earlier and earlier and earlier. Away from sunburn and skinned knees and bruises and tears, away from the air, the sky, the sun, the puddles teeming with life, away from the only laboratory that matters in science--the natural world.

***

Science starts with a child outdoors, it starts within the sulci of the convoluted mush of nerve tissue sitting in our skulls, it starts with our senses.

You cannot see a whole world in a drop of pond water if you've never seen to see the world you live in. We don't need Junior Scientists© donning their fetish garb to impress adults whose understanding of the universe goes no farther than The Big Bang Theory sitcom.

Children are ~~just as~~ more likely to get there reading W.B. Yeats than they are watching a rocket launch on a monitor. They're even more likely to get there if they're allowed to wander around this fine world of ours, chasing whatever interests their souls outdoors, becoming part of the world so many adults no longer realize even exists as they slowly dissolve in front of their huge television screens, inanimate objects inhabited with the spirits of the famous and the fictitious, the fetish in the living room.

Every time I walk home in the dark, seeing the eerie blue manic light leaking through drawn shades, I wonder how we hope to create anything resembling scientists, or even human.

The photo was by Matt Stamey for the Gainesville Sun found here.

The definition of fetish came from dictionary.com.

Faith and fear

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:27:00 GMT

For I took an Earthen vessel, in which I put 200 pounds of Earth that had been dried in a Furnace, which I moystened with Rainwater, and I implanted therein the Trunk or Stem of a Willow Tree, weighing five pounds; and at length, five years being finished, the Tree sprung from thence, did weigh 169 pounds, and about three ounces... I again dried the Earth of the Vessell, and there were found the same two hundred pounds, wanting about two ounces. Therefore 164 pounds of Wood, Barks, and Roots, arose out of water onely.

Jean Baptista van Helmont
Early 17th century experiment

That's how it works. You observe the natural world, take a stab at explaining it, and get it wrong. Van Helmont could have stayed on sure footing--the "stuff" of the tree did not come from the earth he used.

This week I am asking my lambs to memorize the photosynthesis equation. I have them breathe on their hands to remind them what "stuff" plants need for this (carbon dioxide and water), and the warmth of the breath reminds them that the plant needs energy to put the stuff together.

The warmth is sunlight transformed--to chemical bonds in plants, now to body heat.

The words "carbon dioxide" mean little to most, and many keep calling it "carbon"--I've broken a lot of pencils to show them what carbon looks like.

And yet I insist on teaching them that plants take it in on little more evidence than faith in me or in their fear of failing. Faith and fear may work for that old tyme religion, but it should have little place in a science class.

Which makes me a hypocrite--from the Greek hypokrites or "pretender" [Online Etymology Dictionary].

***

Van Helmont's experiment is wondrously flawed--he wanted to show that water feeds plants, but shoved 200 pounds of dirt between his willow and the water. He should have just planted the willow in plain water. (I learned this from David R. Hershey, who talks about this in a fun article "Digging Deeper into Helmont's Famous Willow Tree Experiment, " The American Biology Teacher, 1991.)

My students fear failure in class, and not irrationally. Failure kills students in public education.

We grow all kinds of things in class. Just this week, a child took home a fully formed carrot that grew in peat moss, fed by our breath and the water she gave it.

If I asked a very smart kindergartener how a plant grows seemingly from nothing, she might raise an eyebrow with an incredulous look--"It ate the water!"--how can a grown-up be so dense.

If I ask a sophomore, many will stumble, trying to give me sciency jargon. At least the kindergartner got it half right.

***

Unlearning is hard. My students have been blowing on their hands for 4 months now, since the first week, when we discussed why a candle (or anything else in the classroom) burns.

Over and over and over again I break things down into two categories--"stuff" or energy.

When you burn something, you end up with exactly the same amount of stuff you started with. Exactly, down to the atom. For all the light and heat and sound that erupt in from my lit propane torch, none of that energy cost an atom.

I sweep the propane torch on a large flask, fogging the glass with water, water that did not exist until that moment. I can talk of electrons and oxygen and energy states, but that's a lot of theory to toss out based on a little bit of fog from flame.

Faith, boys and girls, faith. And there's a test in two days. Fear, girls and boys, fear.

And why do I comply. Fear and selfishness. I love teaching, and pretend that I can slip some science in now and again. Right now the tests are winning.

***

Part of me believes that if I can get my students thinking, really thinking, they will do fine on the state exam. I'm not convinced. So long as the exam asks students to discuss invisible gases, I've got to push faith in the classroom. Ironically, van Helmont, who came up with the idea that carbon dioxide is a special kind of gas, distinct from air.

I am convinced that they will know more about the world in June than they did coming in, but, to be fair, that might just reflect a general maturity on their part.

***

I want my students to be wrong at least 5 times a class. At this point, I'll even except quiet wrongs, mistakes made on our old school whiteboards. I won't accept ludicrous wrongs unless there's a train of thought behind them.

One of the most important things I am just learning, now in my fifth year, that the truly ludicrous wrong answers have some thought or history behind them.

If a child hears over and over that photons are "particles" of light, well, then any rational child will think of light as "stuff." If a child hears over and over that plants make food from sunlight, it only confirms that light is "stuff." It's not, of course, but try unteaching this!

We spend a lot of class time unraveling bad science.

May is coming, the New Jersey Biology Competency Exam looms. Who has time for science? Trust me, lambs! Or else you will fail!

*sigh*

Ironically, van Helmont was a victim of faith and The Inquisition;
much of his work was not published in his lifetime, likely out of fear.

The cartoon is, of course, xkcd.

More "New Jersey World Class Standards"

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 11:50:00 GMT

5.2.2.A.2
By the end of Grade 2:
Identify common objects as solids, liquids, or gases.

Throw plasma in there, the most common state of matter known in the universe. You have common examples in the classroom, the incessant hum of fluorescent lights above. You have great examples outside, the sun and the stars. Some students may have plasma televisions at home.

How many teachers have been tripped up by this "simple" question: what is the sun made of?

If you want to keep a state of matter up your sleeve, save the Bose-Einstein condensate for high school.

5.2.4.A.3
By the end of Grade 4:
Objects and substances have properties, such as weight and volume, that can be measured using appropriate tools.

I spent weeks teasing apart weight and mass in a freshman science class. Mass is, at this level anyway, the amount of matter (call it "stuff") in something.

Weight is a measure of the force of gravity on the stuff you are measuring. It depends on where all the other objects in the universe happen to be at that moment, since everything is pulling on everything else.

The closest huge ball of stuff is the Earth, so weight and mass seem synonymous.

They're not--your mass does not change on the moon, but your weight does--but you knew this already. Even 2nd graders know this. You can show them astronauts jumping around the moon and ask them why they can jump so high. They'll parrot the standard answer ("less gravity").

I suspect most of us are afraid to touch gravity because we just plain don't get it.

I would love to start the year with a class full of young adults who get that we don't get it.
That's how science starts.

Really.....

The states of matter graphic comes from Chem4Kids.com.
The moon clip from YouTube, uploaded by Amontai Yagala

Algorithms for Algernon

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:10:00 GMT

OK, this is a long one, mostly scattered thoughts written on a snow day, after reading The Mayor of Casterbridge for the last time. It's mostly for me. If you want to come along for the ride, bring a steaming Thermos of coffee.

People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart. Before the 2008 stock-market crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before the bank makes bad loans; we ask teachers to teach to standardized tests. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

Jaron Lanie, Harper's Magazine, February, 2010

I find it fascinating that as information becomes cheaper, we worship it more.

***

There's value in owning things in your mind, as opposed to relying on social networks or Google or Wikipedia. The brain does not work in programmed algorithms. We screw up. Ideas mutate. We make leaps and bounds that often fail, but occasionally resonate.

There's value in owning things in your mind. You cannot connect ideas, or things (thank you, Dr. Williams), lying loose all over the place. You can only shuffle file cards so fast, you can only link so many web pages before losing the gist.

We are privileged to have sensations, neural connections to this world, and a brain to know it, so far as it can be known. The machine is the product of an imperfect animal. If there is perfection, it lies outside the machine.

In Thomas Hardy's time, scythes and hay-rakes and mattocks ruled the countryside. No electricity, no phones, and social networks were formed at pubs. The economy of Casterbridge depended on the earth--livestock, corn, wheat, and all the labor and tools that went into reaping what our land can grant us.

Despite our conceits, our algorithms, our nanosecond technology, the gifts of the true economy have not changed. We still reap what we sow. We still eat and ***, we still woo and reproduce, we still depend on others. That the others are now strangers and driven by profit and not love has changed us, for now.

***

Bacteria communicate with each other. They have different signals for those of their own kind, and share universal signals with other clans/species.

Squids "talk" through light. Humans "talk" through smell.

Nothing can replicate the utter joy and sorrow I felt seeing the eerie dying glow of a comb jelly on a warm August beach, so contrary to what I know that I could not see it for what it was. Until my imagination exceeds the possibilities around me, I'll trust my thoughts, my clan's stories, our collective, flawed understanding of a world that exists before I plunge into the grid that frames a limited, knowable world.

(And I will add the story of the "talking" bacteria....)

***

I see bright senior high school students struggle with basic tasks subsumed by the network. Seniors who cannot look words up in a dictionary. Seniors who "know" calculus, but cannot solve simple arithmetic problems.

These are among the kids that will easily pass the state exam.

I suspect (or rather hypothesize) that most folks in charge of detailing curriculum at higher levels do not grasp science. Or perhaps they grasp science but are under unprecedented pressure from the Feds to ignore what they know and develop something that results in more money.

I get that real biologists need to speak a common language, a professional language, to communicate cogently and efficiently to fellow professionals. I get that kids need a basic understanding of the language of science to grasp (and critically assess) the technical leaps and bounds now more dependent on profit than promise.

Most of my students, however, need to grasp how science works. We are creating a generation of children who look cute spouting off big words and phrases, yet do not wonder why a light goes on when you hit a switch.

We need to cultivate wonder.

***

Our former Superintendent told the teachers, publicly, that it does not matter what we think about NCLB, it's the law, and we must comply. Had he said that 8% of our budget depends on Federal funding, and that the district has weighed its options and decided that imposing certain tasks, odious (and ultimately useless) as they may be, matters more than the value of real education, well, I'd have more respect for his decision.

Mr. Digesere was a music teacher before he was superintendent. Lucille Davies, our prior Commissioner of Education, is a lawyer whose teaching experience was as a Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) teacher at her local parish. Bret Schundler, the new guy, cut his teeth over at Salomon Brothers, and most recently was COO of The King's College, so at least he's rubbed shoulders with educators.

Don't get me started on Arne....

All believe in the algorithms, believe in the standardized test, believe in an infinitely growing economy if only we can find the right algorithm. Pick any wonk in control of education policy today, and you'll get the same results. Growth. Standards. Competition. Economy.

I'd bet a 6 pack of my best home-brewed mead that none of them could explain respiration or photosynthesis or meiosis, or even half the things dictated by the 2009 state standards. (I would really like to hold on to my 2008 blueberry melomel--only 20 bottles left--but I've no doubt they're safe with this offer.)

***

If you're a bit stir crazy today, go out and find a tree. Trace its branches. Imagine the wind, the light, the forces that shaped that tree.

No two trees have exactly the same branch pattern--the tree's branch pattern tells a story of seeking light, or bending to wind, of battles with bugs and fungi and and perhaps lightning or a child's tree fort.

Two acorns with identical DNA will produce two very different oak trees--trees are designed to respond to their environment. Each new branch arises from a complex combination of triggers. Each tree is unique.

Humans and trees share a common ancestor. We have errant children--one of the joys and frustrations of a functioning classroom. I need the to pass the state exam, and I want them to learn science.

We are going to learn the hard way that the true economy is based on life, on the dirt we walk on, on life itself. I plan to keep on teaching science. It's what I'm paid to do.
I am going to a conference March 1, sponsored by the New Jersey Dep't of Education. I am dragging along a fellow biology teacher, almost as cranky as me, to Module D: Aligning Biology Curriculum to the End-of-Course Assessment. (I have no idea what "Module D" means, but it sounds, um, serious....)

Read the title of the workshop--we have put the cart before the horse, an analogy that no longer works in a universe of bytes instead of bits. We are expected to align the course to fit a limited exam that must fit within a class period or two.

If I had to test my lambs on whether they grasped anything new this year, I'd give them a few pill bugs, access to the various pieces of equipment in the classroom, and ask them to learn something about their behavior. I'd expect them to develop hypotheses, and set up replicable experiments. I'd hope they can examine evidence. And most of all, I hope that when they're done, they realize how little they can know about a pill bug trapped in a Petri dish, how little they know about anything.

I'd furtively trail them as they walked home--and if one lifted up a rock to find another pill bug, they pass.

New feature: Upload your own banner image

Anonymous — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:36:00 GMT

For a while now, we've been missing an important feature: the ability to upload your own banner image for your Our Science Fair website. You could always change your banner image, as long as the image already existed on another website (typically the banner from your school's primary website). But you couldn't create your own image on your computer and upload it. Well, now you can! The feature is pretty self-explanatory. Simply go to the Basic Settings page, scroll down to where you see Banner image, and click the Change... button.

In the popup window that appears, click the Browse... button to locate your image on your computer, and click OK.

When you get back to the Basic Settings screen, don't forget that you have to actually press the Save button to apply your new banner to your website:

And voila! When you go back and visit your site, you should see your new banner at the top:

Note that the banner image we used in this example wasn't the ideal choice because it doesn't stretch across the width of the entire page. A better choice would have been an image that fits perfectly in the space allocated for the banner, which is 950 x 150 pixels.

--Rajeev

Elephant toothpaste on the David Letterman show

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:53:00 GMT

I recently wrote a guest blog post for Kayla Fay, founder of 24 Hour Science Projects. The post talks about a recent episode of the Late Show with David Letterman, where he had Kid Scientists doing demonstrations on his program. It was a really fun episode, but it left me filled with questions like, "Did that girl just say 'sylum'? What the heck is 'sylum'?", and "What's that black liquid she's using?", and "Wow, if I could reproduce that demonstration for our science fair, the kids would go nuts.". So, I did a little bit of research, and I figured out how to reproduce the demonstration, and I thought I'd share my findings. Check out the post here. Enjoy!

Kick off your science fair with a show!

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:47:00 GMT

How do you generate excitement for your upcoming science fair? How do you encourage kids in all grade levels to voluntarily participate when it's not a requirement?

Many schools kick off their science fair season with a fun school-wide assembly in the gymnasium that is all about science. A great kick-off assembly has a lot of the following characteristics:

Less talk, more show! Sorry teachers, but the assembly isn't the right time to teach the kids about specific scientific principles ... at least not in any great detail. Do lots of demos that will fascinate your young audience, and keep the show moving. Don't spend more than 8 minutes on any single topic or demo. The main goal is for the kids to walk away realizing that science is really really cool.
It's like magic. A great science demonstration has a lot in common with a magic trick. It amazes your audiences and leaves them wondering how it works. But the difference is that with science, you don't have to keep the "trick" a secret. Definitely offer a basic explanation of what just happened, but don't expect the learning to necessarily stick. (Teachers may choose to follow up with more detailed explanations in the classroom.)
Between 30-60 minutes long. That's long enough that it's worth the effort to gather the entire student body in one place, but not so long that the kids start to lose interest toward the end.
Between 100-400 students. That's big enough that students feel the excitement of a large gathering, but small enough that everyone will be able to see the demos and many students may even get to participate. Which brings me to ...

Image courtesy of Pacific Science Center

Audience participation. A great presenter will engage the students directly. He/she might ask the kids questions so they can show off their scientific knowledge in front of their peers. But even better, he/she will ask for volunteers to come up to the stage to actually be part of the demonstration. One year, Sam from Mad Science did a show for us where he actually got our principal up on stage. The demo involved using Bernoulli's principle to cover her in toilet paper. Thankfully she was a great sport about it, and needless to say, the kids thought it was hilarious!
No technical difficulties. Don't kill the vibe by keeping your audience waiting while you figure out how to get the microphone hooked up. Test it all out ahead of time.
Keep it safe. No matter how cool the demo is, it won't leave the impression you want if someone accidentally gets hurt. So make sure your presenter has practiced everything many times before and knows how to keep everyone safe.
Plug the science fair! Now that you've got their undivided attention, don't forget to actually tell them why they're there. Something short and sweet at the end of the show can work great: "Now, after seeing all that, who here thinks science is cool?!! (Wait for hands to go up.) Well, guess what everyone? Our school is having our very own science fair this spring, and all of you get to participate! Go home and talk to your parents about it, and come up with an idea for a science project. You can pick whatever topic you want and design your own science experiments at home! So ... who here is going to do a science project for the science fair?!!! (Wait for hands to go up.) Alright everyone, your teachers will be giving you more information when you get back to your classes. Thank you!"

So, once you've actually decided you want to do a kick-off assembly for your school, how do you actually find someone to do the show? Here are some options:

Your science teachers are pretty busy already, but it certainly doesn't hurt to ask if one of them might be willing to step up and put together a show.
Another option might be to find a parent volunteer in your community who is especially passionate about science. Just make sure they're actually qualified to do an engaging show and most importantly keep it safe. The internet is full of great science demos that anyone can do without needing a lot of special equipment or materials. Dry ice makes for some fun demos and is available in the meat section of many grocery stores.
It's possible that your school already has a relationship with a specific educational science organization, such as Science Adventures or Mad Science. These organizations may be offering after-school science enrichment programs for many students at your school. If that's the case, they may very well be willing to do a show for you free of charge (because it's a way for them to get in front of all the students at once and promote their after-school programs).
Check your nearest science museum, science center, or children's museum to see if they offer any such programs. You may have to pay for show, so find out if your school or PTA has any budget for this kind of thing.

Image courtesy of Pacific Science Center

I live in Sammamish, WA, which is a suburb of Seattle. At our elementary school, we get Pacific Science Center to come in and do our kick-off assembly, and they do an amazing job. They have a program called Science On Wheels, which is specifically intended for this kind of thing. They offer four different shows, all of which are really exciting for the students (at all grade levels, including high school). Because our school has about 600 students (K-5), we actually do two separate assemblies back-to-back so that each assembly has about 300 students and runs about 40 minutes long. This works out well, and makes for a really fun Friday in January.

Good luck! Please leave a comment if you have other thoughts or suggestions! And don't forget to get a free science fair website for your school at http://oursciencefair.com/.

--Rajeev

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