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Science and Activities for Kids |
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Kit Building |
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Making Ice-Cream with Liquid Nitrogen (best recipe on the Web!) |
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Mix: 1 qt. light cream, 1/2 qt. heavy cream, 3/4 cup sugar and 3/4 tsp. vanilla extract in a large plastic bowl. Mix thoroughly until all the sugar dissolves in the cream. |
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Carefully and slowly add liquid nitrogen while stirring the ice cream mix using a wooden spoon. Warning: your brain must be in gear! Use goggles and gloves made for cryogenic handling! |
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Keep on mixin’! Don’t stop mixing and don’t let the icecream get clumpy. |
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Ready to enjoy in 30 seconds flat! |
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Cool girls know how to solder!
Those tiny, delicate hands combined with the dexterity of a Nintendo master make mean, lean kit-building machines! |
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Hannah built this cool retro-looking oscilloscope clock kit available from CathodeCorner. |
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Shanni built this pulse-induction metal detector based on the GoldPIC circuit. The frame is made of PVC tubing from the HomeDepot. |
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Triops (or Sea Monkey) Webcam |
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Triops are little 3 eyed acrobatic crustacean creatures that live in water. They can double in size each day until their full adult size of 1 to 2" is reached. Triops live for about 20 to 90 days.
The "Triops" name comes from the Greek phrase meaning three eyes. Indeed, the triops appears to have three eyes! Because they date back to the time of the dinosaurs, they are also called dinosaur shrimp.
Triops are usually in constant motion and have entertaining feeding and breathing patterns that include amazing acrobatics & upside-down swimming. |
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▲ We hatched trips that we bought in a kit. We then set up a free webcam program to snap pictures of the aquarium every 2 hours. We had lots of people from all over the world visiting the website to check on our triops. |
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Arts and Crafts with Engineering Plastics |
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You can build really cool toys, robots and all sorts of neat crafts using engineering plastics. We like to use “Delrin” when machining (with a baby mill and a baby lathe).
However, the absolutely coolest plastic to build stuff with is “ShapeLock”. It is "Ultra-High Molecular Weight Low Temperature Thermoplastic. Similar to nylon and polypropylene in toughness., except it's easy to work with and shape."
You get a bag of plastic pellets, put them in 160F water, and they phase-change, becoming soft and moldable. If you don't let the water get too hot, when you take the plastic out, it's cool enough to shape with your hands. When it cools down, it hardens into a strong, durable, paintable, machineable white plastic. If you don't like what you made, you just put it in 160F water again and reshape it. |
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Rockets and other Flying Machines |
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© 2005 David Prutchi. All rights reserved. |
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Our Dog - “Neutron” |
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We love to travel to interesting places. Learning History, Geography and Biology is a lot more fun when you are there to witness it! |
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The Bernoulli Blower |
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▲ An “Aerodium” is essentially a gigantic Bernoulli blower. It uses an airplane engine and a huge airplane propeller to produce enough wind to levitate (float) a few people at a time. These two pictures are of Dad flying in the Aerodium. [Click here for a cool video clip on the Aerodium 13MB .mov] [Click here for a shorter video 1.9MB .wmv] |
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Bernoulli's principle tells us that air that is moving at high speed has lower pressure than still air. The air moves around the ball to create a pocket around the ball of low pressure air. When the ball moves to the side of the pocket, it will be pushed back in. And the upward force from the air stream keeps the ball aloft. It's quite a cool effect!
This effect is only a part of what makes airplanes fly, and many schools inappropriately use this effect to explain flight. While the Bernoulli Effect is real and it does play a role for certain types of planes, in general it’s a fairly small contribution, and for many planes it isn’t even necessary. Remember that an airplane can fly upside-down! |
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▲ The air moves around the ball to create a pocket of low pressure air around it. Whenever the ball moves to the side of the pocket, it will be pushed back in. |
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Shanni built this Bernoulli blower using a surplus cooling fan from an old-type computer (the ones that took a full room). It is capable of floating much larger balls, but our dog Neutron bit the beach ball when we were trying to take this picture… ► |
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ROBOTICS! |
