Science Fair
If homeschooling meant missing out on science fairs, then homeschooling would be a lot less fun. Fortunately fun is not the primary reason we homeschool, and even more fortunately, homeschooling doesn’t mean missing out on science fairs.
Tonight is the Friday School science fair (ask me if you don’t know what Friday School is, or can’t guess), and we’re ready to go. This is the first time Hannah has been old enough to participate, so Dad had double duty this year.
She conducted an experiment to see which medium would grow marigolds the best: potting soil, dirt from the back yard, sand, or Quickrete. The Quickrete lost. I made a really neat 4-minute time lapse video of one of the more successful pots sprouting, and I would share it here if it weren’t many megabytes in its smallest meaningful form. You’ll just have to take my word for it: way cool.
Zach’s project was a scale model of a trebuchet that he, my Dad, and I built last year. We tested it against a Trebuchet simulator program we bought online, which turned out to be pretty accurate. It said we’d get 4.4m out of our missle, and we actually got around 4.7m. A nice screen capture of the simluator output is here.
I made a couple of very brief movies of the treb firing. They are here and here. Sorry the second one is rotated, but I am not quite up to speed on my video editing tools yet. I could get it rotated, but at the expense of the sound (gotta have the birds tweeting and the squeek of the throwing arm pivot) and too much quality. Just cock your head; you’ll be fine.
Next year: the effects of caffeine on Strong Sad.
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- Posted by Tim on Wednesday, April 21, 2004 at 1:08:54 pm PDT
- Category: Miscellany
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6 Responses to “Science Fair”
Stuff like missing science fairs *is* one of the reasons we homeschool (only half kidding.) Science fairs are some of my most traumatic homeschooling memories.
But to each his own — that’s another beauty of homeschooling.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 21st, 2004 at 5:31 pm |Oops, I mean, “Science fairs are some of my most traumatic *school* memories.”
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 21st, 2004 at 5:32 pm |Ah, the trebuchet. There’s just nothing like it. Someday, I will build one. Some friends and I were going to do so a few years back, with the intent of winning the annual pumpkin hurl at one of the Halloween/Harvest festival things out in Aurora. Well, life intervened, as it often does.
Yeah, trebuchets are way cool.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 22nd, 2004 at 2:21 pm |>Yeah, trebuchets are way cool.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 23rd, 2004 at 1:58 pm |Pentamom:
My kids will probably end up saying the same thing. Dad will never push them to be Captain of the Team, but he will drive them to do good science fair projects.
Jed:
“Trebuchets are really cool” was the real conclusion of the experiment. We had to make up the stuff about the mathematical model just for appearances.
Zach is after me to build a larger-scale treb for that same event. It would be hard to beat that slingshot that’s there every year, though.
Fairchild:
Whose idea was the Quickrete, again?
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 27th, 2004 at 8:39 am |If I had had a parent who was really involved in science fairs, I might have felt differently. But I always wound up being the kid with the really lame-o thing because my parents didn’t feel it was their job to help me with schoolwork (and I really don’t have a problem with that idea when you’re paying taxes and/or tuition, just on the theory that kids need to be responsible for their own work) and teachers just let the kids figure it out for ourselves almost entirely, which meant that the kids with either a natural scientific bent or parents who liked to help with projects, or both, shone like stars, and the rest of us hated the whole process and looked lousy.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 27th, 2004 at 12:35 pm |