Inventions , Gadgets and Gizmos!
Hurry! Grab your camera and Click! The shutter snaps and the image is captured, forever frozen in time. Did you know the first camera was the size of a room? That’s rather hard to fit in your pocket! In this lesson students learn the history of cameras, learn a lot about light, poke pinholes to make living pictures, build an actual working camera, deconstruct an actual working camera [and do their best to put it back together], find out why a picture is worth a thousand words, learn what horses have to do with the history of motion pictures, and discover what makes it all click!
There are a lot of things we don’t know that we don’t know, so how do we come to know what it is we’ve never known? All it takes is a problem and a question. A whisper of an idea sparked by a simple question, even one like, “What else could I do with this?” and then we’re off, with bright eyes and bright ideas! To teach creativity we have to invoke curiosity and teach the ability to ask good questions. That’s the start and the heart of this lesson where students get to practice their own ingenious ingenuity by solving problems; figuring out how to fly a funky little paper airplane on a tsunami of air; creating wild, wacky, and wondrous inventions; discovering how bikes are turned into blenders and soda bottles into bulbs; finding out that they’re a target, learning the power of a tiny touch of yellow, ad-ing things up, and much much more!
Once upon a time in ancient Greece,…okay, hydraulics isn’t actually part of a story about a seven headed serpent slobbering all over someone, as much fun as that would be, rather it is a branch of science and engineering that really gives kids a lift! Explore the wide world of hydraulics with students, learn about that rascal Pascal and his exploding barrels, create battle-bots that run on the power of water, and much much more.
The microwave oven is now an essential part of most kitchens when once it was considered a luxury only the very wealthy could afford. Now, everybody likes to use the microwave to pop popcorn, melt butter, or make hot chocolate. Unfortunately, most people still have no idea how their favorite popcorn popping machine even works! In this lesson students learn how it was all inspired by chocolate, meet the inventor, hypthesize and conduct experiments that will help them figure out how this miracle machine does its job, learn about waves, make soap grow, and deduce that with the help of a little chocolate and a microwave they too can measure the speed of light.
Welcome to the Harvest! In this fun lesson students make scarecrows come to life by building animatronic hands, creating incredible 3D art that jumps off the page, mapping out legends of a worldwide protector, and getting a scarecrow eye view of nature by crafting photographic poetry. It’s a lesson students will never forget!
Have you ever been "shocked" when you touched a doorknob, a car-door handle, or a water fountain? Ouch! Well, then you already know something about the effects of static electricity. What you might not know is how static electricity happens. Students get to explore the structure of atoms, learn how opposites attract, discover practical purposes for static, find out what's the biggest kind of static electricity, and see for themselves the shocking effects of static during hands-on experiments like the Super Sparker!
"catapult (n) - ancient device used for hurling cats at the enemy. It was later replaced by the rockapult, a much more effective weapon." Okay, that really isn’t true, probably, but seriously, weapons that once smashed castle and fortress walls are now great lessons in how basic mechanical principles can, and did, turn simple materials into very useful, effective, and protective tools. Students learn the power of simple machines like levers, spend some time with Newton's laws, and play with potential and kinetic energy while constructing and designing their own catapults.