Be an engineer and design your own roller coaster!

To help celebrate National Engineering Week (Feb 20 – 26), we wanted to share this exhilarating engineering activity you can do at home, (provided by Casey Wiley, volunteer coordinator at Mid-America Science Museum)!

Do you like roller coasters?

I’ll admit that I’m a huge chicken and refuse to ride one, but I do love to watch them fly through the sky! Did you ever wonder how they work?

Make Your Own Roller Coaster!

The cool thing about science is it’s all around us and touches our lives in so many ways. Scientists aren’t just boring people in lab coats trapped in stinky laboratories. Engineers use physics, math and creativity to design our world, even cool stuff like roller coasters!

Here’s your chance to be an engineer and design your own dream roller coaster! Try to make it fast, fun and exciting, but don’t lose your marbles (I mean, your passengers)!

Try to make it fast, fun and exciting, but don’t loose your marbles!

Materials:

• 5-7 six-foot lengths of foam pipe insulation tubing cut in half lengthwise
• Round toothpicks (approx. 20)
• 16mm marbles (5)
• Container to catch the marbles
• Flexible tape measurer

What to Do

1. Design and test a preliminary prototype using one marble, a container to catch the marble, one foam piece, one toothpick and a one-foot piece of masking tape
2. As you test, try to think about your final design and the amount of materials that will be needed.
3. After 5 minutes, take what you learned from the preliminary prototypes and get the rest of the materials you need.
4. Construct your roller coaster! Try to answer the following questions as you test and design your ride!

Why do roller coasters have corkscrew turns instead of loop-de-loops?

Questions

1. Can you make your roller coaster stand alone?
2. Was there a stronger design/construction that seemed to work?
3. What did you have to change to keep the marble form falling out?
4. Is the ride safe?
5. Why do roller coasters have corkscrew turns instead of loop-de-loops?
6. How far did your marble travel?
7. What happened when you changed the loop?
8. What other modifications did you do to make your marble travel farther?

What’s happening?
Engineers use their math and science know-how in all areas of an amusement park. They need to understand how to make rides fast and fun, without compromising structural integrity which is needed for ride safety.

Watch this video about building the roller coasters you see at amusement parks!

Hug an Engineer — They Make the World Go ‘Round! Well, not really the world… but you get the idea.

February 20 – 26 is National Engineering Week. If you have an engineer (or two) in your life, hug them. They do important work, like designing my spaceship to travel the universe in search of fresh sources of Nostradimum. Without engineers, I would just have to satisfy myself with taking over the world, but now I can dream much bigger — I’m going to take over the universe!!!

Yeah, um, so… something more applicable to you guys stuck here on Earth: they design roller coasters, skateparks, faster engines, alternative forms of energy (like those windmills you see popping up all around), nanotechnology, clothing that takes your temperature, even improvements in the medical field. The design and problem-solving skills utilized in engineering combines with almost every field you can imagine to make things run faster, work better, safer, more efficiently, and often times, make the things you do everyday for fun even more fun.

For example, take a look at this video that talks about the science of skateboarding, which involves — what else — engineering!

Click on the youtube link if you want to see more of his videos!

Introducing my cousin, Clotilda BeGood!

Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day 2011 is Thursday, February 24th. So, next week, we have an extra-special guest blogger, my very own cousin, Clotilda BeGood. She is quite attractive, so I thought I’d share a photo of her with you today.

I keep telling her she should use my hair gel to make her hair pink, orange, or blue, but she refuses. Something about the way I got the main ingredient, Nostradimium, by pillaging planets and destroying worlds across the universe.

Anyhoo, Clotilda is a girl, and she is an engineer, so she is the perfect choice to introduce girls to engineering! She’s going to talk about some female engineers that are making it big, and having fun at the same time!

So stay tuned and come back next week! We’ll show you how to make your own model roller coaster, introduce some careers you may have never thought of, and, of course, share some more pictures of ME!

Bringing Educators Together at Network Workshop

One of the missions of the Arkansas Discovery Network is capacity building at the partner museums, to improve upon what they offer the public. One way we do that is with Educator Workshops. A few weeks ago educators from around the Network got together at the Museum of Discovery to learn how to better present Nanotechnology to their visitors. Educators from each museum shared what has worked and hasn’t worked as far as teaching Nano to the public, and especially children in the younger grades who present a special challenge with this sometimes hard-to-comprehend subject.

Mindy Porter shares her experience attenting the NiseNET nano workshop at the Nanotechnogy Educators Meeting

Jill Kary, from Arkansas State University Museum in Jonesboro summed up the biggest benefit from the network workshops: “Hearing the ideas of others who work with Nano was extremely helpful.”

The network is a part of a national network called NISEnet, which has provided partners with the Nanotechnology: What’s the Big Deal traveling exhibit and NanoDays activities kits, as well as unlimited free resources on it’s website, nisenet.org and a workshop for museum educators around the country.

Nanotechnogy Educators Meeting

Two representatives from NISEnet and the Children’s Museum of Houston, Keith Ostfeld and Aaron Guerrero  were on hand to share their experiences and explain the new NanoDays kits that many of the partners have received this year and in years past.

Mindy Porter from Mid-America Science Museum attended the nano workshop put on by NiseNET and shared what she learned with fellow educators. She said this about the network workshop: “I enjoyed hearing ideas from my fellow AR museum educators. I also learned a lot when Keith showed us the Nano Days kit activities. It was great to hear the extra ideas and tips on how to make the activities extra special.”

Brenda Hengel added, “The best part was actually spending time with Aaron and Keith – putting faces to names. It’s great to have them as a Nano resource! Always good to go over what Nano is and isn’t for review. And hearing Mindy’s presentation on her Nano trip to San Francisco was a plus.”

Along with Keith and Aaron, Gled Rexha and Enka Dervishi from the Nanotechnology Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock shared their views from actually working with Nanotechnology and museum programs they have held.

UALR at Nanotechnogy Educators Meeting

Hearing from people actually working in the field is very important to those trying to teach. As Alice Penrod, of Texarkana Museums System, said “Hearing the ideas of others who work with Nano was extremely helpful.”

We are planning to publish several nanotechnology experiments to try at home to make this topic more simple to understand and to show it’s real-world applications. We have one blog entry already explaining the smallness of this big topic. Stay tuned for more!

You can see more pics of the network’s Nanotechnology Educator’s Workshop on our flickr page!

The shape of things to come – designing strong buildings

Hello and welcome back to our blog! This is Derrick Warren again with another feature from the Race for Planet X mobile museum. Today I will be talking about the Earthquake Table.

In this exhibit, students get to test their engineering and architectural knowledge about the strength of materials and design concepts.

Earthquake Table

Explorers (students) work with a pit of sand and several building blocks. They are provided with three example structures (but have the freedom to create whatever they like) to build and test to see if their design can withstand a series of earthquakes. To do this, they will press one of three buttons to simulate an earthquake. The table will begin to shake with a weak, medium, or strong magnitude earthquake and the explorers will keep track of the amount of time their structure stands up to the earthquake and record their data.

That’s it for the Earthquake Table exhibit. Before I go, I would like to share an experiment with you called “Strength of Shapes.”  Just like at the Shake Table on the Race for Planet ‘X’, you can observe how shape affects the strength of an object.

Materials:

• 3 sheets of copy paper
• 1 roll of tape
• 3 “light weight” (1lb.) books — weigh the books ahead of time
  or have a scale to weigh the books. (old postal scales work well)

How do you think that the shape of an object will affect its strength? How does the shape of a building affect the amount of weight it will hold?

Think of possible three-dimensional shapes.  This is the variable that will be changed in this experiment.  Make a triangular pyramid, a rectangular pyramid and a cylinder.  Write down your hypothesis stating which of the three shapes will hold the most weight.

Create a data chart to record your information: Shape of object, weight held before crushing “building” (3 trials), and average.

Remember that the only variable you are changing is the shape of the building. Everything else must be the same for each test.  For example, the same books must be used each time, the paper building must be on the same surface each time, and the type of paper used for each building must be the same.

The Race for Planet 'X'

If you are working with a group, share your findings.  Collect the averaged data and complete a graph of the group average.

The “Race for Planet X” is funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation and is available to the sixth grade students of Arkansas for FREE! For more information on how we can visit your school, please visit our website at www.arkansasdiscoverynetwork.org/museum-wheels or send an email to PlanetX@amod.org.

Oh Snow You Didn’t 2011

When I chose Arkansas as my headquarters, I didn’t count on all this snow. It doesn’t mix well with my gorgeous pink locks and makes my toes cold. But what are you gonna do? It’s here, so let’s make the best of it!

Snow: pretty on the outside, cooold when it gets inside your boots and soaks through your socks.

My plan to make the best of it? Sit by my fireplace until it is ALL GONE! And, to share with you a cool, er… coooold, science experiment you can try at home!

Have you ever noticed that we use salt to melt the snow and ice? The science behind that is simple: Salt lowers the freezing/melting point of water (in this case ice or snow). The salt dissolves into the liquid water in the ice and lowers its freezing point. If you watch you can see the salt melting the ice — the ice immediately around the grain of salt melts, and it spreads out from that point. To find out exactly how this happens, go to http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/road-salt.htm.

Salt and a String
This is a fun science experiment/magic trick you can do at home!

Materials:

• ice cube
• string
• salt
• cup of water

Put an ice cube in a cup of water. Cut a piece of string a few inches long. Try to pick up the ice cube using just the string, NO fingers! (That’s cheating, and coooold!) You will see that it doesn’t work. Now, dip the end of the string in the water and lay it across the ice cube. Sprinkle some salt on top of both the ice cube and the string. Wait a minute or so and then try to pick up the ice again using just the string. It should work this time! The salt melted the ice just a bit and the water refroze around the string.

You can find this and other snow-related science, as well as links to all you ever wanted to know about snow and ice, at http://hubpages.com/hub/Easy-Snow-and-Ice-Experiments.

Have a great weekend!

P.S. I stole that title from a loyal Facebook fan and minion, Natalie Ghidhotti #ohsnowyoudidnt2011. She’s so clever!

If Children were classified as Animals…

Hello, citizens, and welcome to the sarcastic portion of the Arkansas Discovery Network’s weekly blog posts.  My name is Nichole Ashley, and I am the Museum of Discovery’s Animal Care person.

Nichole cleaning out the mice cages.

This basically means that I am paid to play with animals (Ha ha!), as well as take care of all of their daily needs such as cleaning, feeding, watering, chauffeuring, administering daily backrubs to, and cooing over all of the nearly one hundred and twenty members of our in-house animal community.

Holding one of the museum's newest additions, an adorably cute baby chinchilla!

I would like to tell you that the thing I love most about working here is helping the children; however, you and I both know that is a lie. You see, reader, I have a tragic and chronic allergy to children;  large groups of them have been known to break me out in a serious case of hives and after a certain amount of exposure I must retreat to my lair to recover.

No, we both know that the best part of my job is, of course, the animals; and not because animals are easy to deal with or because I love all living creatures (I do not), but because they don’t care if my dancing is terrible or if I belt out random lines from songs that I can never entirely remember. It doesn’t matter to them if I’m not wearing makeup or if my socks are two completely different colors, patterns, and lengths; and it doesn’t matter to me if their combined smell makes peoples’ eyes water.

Nichole and Eli, enjoying each other's company.

And you know what? If certain someones (chinchillas, I’m talking to you!) immediately tip over their food bowls as soon as I put them in their cages or even if certain birds whom shall not be named (*cough* Eli *cough*) screech at all hours of the day or any time I am on the phone with someone important, it doesn’t matter because I love them anyway, and I can tolerate that they are tiring, smelly, and loud, and I know that they’ve really no choice but to tolerate me because I feed them.

Tumbling Tumblewing

Flight is miraculous, and sending humans in planes or rockets into the sky seems unimaginably dangerous. However through extensive study in physics and aerodynamics, the human race pulled it off over 100 years ago and has even made it safe! Whether it be in a space shuttle, on a unicorn, or the back of a dragon, many young minds fantasize about flight. Therefore I wanted to find an experiment that was simple yet rewarding and fun.

While searching the Internet, I stumbled upon a “tumblewing” experiment earlier last year and it was received with great enthusiasm by the kids visiting the museum.

You can make your own tumblewing and make it fly!

The Tumblewing is a single winged piece of paper cut and folded so that when released from an elevation, it does numerous consecutive and entertaining back flips. It can have a very predictable flight path, so it’s fun to try and set out “landing zones” to aim for from above. The kids get to adjust the Tumblewing so it falls in a controlled spiral, or a single gentle curve to one direction, or you can even attempt the perfectly straight path.

An expansion of the experiment is to try and get sustained flight by providing a cushion of rising air from a large piece of cardboard. You have to release the Tumblewing and walk with it, and have the board angled so it pushes air up to the Tumblewing. This is very tricky and hard to get the hang of, so don’t expect it on the first attempt. The website (http://www.sciencetoymaker.org/tumblewing/index.htm) has additional information on the construction and testing of the Tumblewing, so go check it out. It’s a really fun and entertaining experiment pertaining to aerodynamics and physics, and is appropriate for ages five and up.

Watch these videos and make your own tumbling tumblewing!

Pattern to Make Tumbewing (download PDF)

You can find this activity at http://www.sciencetoymaker.org/tumblewing/index.htm. Check out the homepage — it has a lot of really fun experiments for many different age groups.

Getting paid to play… a childhood dream come true!

Our guest blogger today is Sherry Marshall, Director of the Oklahoma Museum Network, a network very similar to the Arkansas Discovery Network, both funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.

As a child, no one ever explained to me that you could get paid to play.  Or that by taking my old telephone apart, I was developing critical job skills.  It seemed to me the logical thing to do at the time.  For my parents, not so much.  But I think they appreciate it now.

While exploring the laws of physics, visitors to 3-2-1 Blast break the boundaries of our atmosphere as they dock with the International Space Station in specialized simulators.

As Director of the Oklahoma Museum Network funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, I get the chance to tell kids just that.  The Oklahoma Museum Network is a partnership of five museums dedicated to bringing relevant discovery experiences throughout our state.  Fortunately, the Arkansas Discovery Network initiative helped pave the way for us.

WeatherWorks takes you into the complexities of weather

Working with our Oklahoma partner museums, we develop new strategies to help serve our community.  We get to build new traveling exhibits, provide workshop opportunities for teachers, and help our museums be the very best in providing exciting adventures for everyone.  We even have a mobile museum, Science Matters Mobile Museum.  Hopefully it can come to Arkansas to visit soon!  The network really is pretty awesome, because we get to spread the value of play, investigation, and curiosity.

For some swirling fun, you can step inside the Ride the Tornado booth at WeatherWorks.

I didn’t always know how to follow my dream.  It was a museum that helped me.  When I was young I loved coming to the science museum.  I mean, I looooooooooooooved it!  Where else could I discover how things worked, and what those colored wires in my telephone could do?  I even wrote a paper in fifth grade about the science museum and how awesome it was.  It was that museum that made me comfortable with science.  After finishing a physics degree I realized that hmmm, somebody has to actually work there, it isn’t just a place to go, but it can be a place to, WOW, work!!  Seventeen years later I am still schlepping science at the museum and love it as much as day one.

Science Matters is a traveling exhibit vehicle that presents powerful learning experiences, providing discovery learning in areas of the Oklahoma where museum facilities do not exist.

So what does this have to do with anything?  No matter what age you are, look around at what you love.  Somebody has to actually do something with that, why not you?  Do you like nature?  Think about all the opportunities out there that you can surround yourself with nature!  As you look at that acorn on the ground, take it apart and see what’s in it.  Open up the seed, figure out what all that stuff is.  Do you like space?  You could be the first human on Mars!  The little steps we take, asking questions, being interested and exploring, lead to bigger steps of finding answers and developing the skills we need to better understand the world around us.

So take the time to play, get dirty, experiment, question, and above all tinker around!  There are great resources around that can help.  Check out instructables.com or Make magazine.  You may think it’s playing, but it is really valuable job training!

No hot weather in Hot Springs, but plenty of cool exhibits!

Happy Friday, Minions! I hope you are all doing well and staying warm! It was a little cold in Little Rock this week, so when I heard that my travel buddy, Stephen, was going to Mid-America Science Museum in HOT Springs, I jumped at the chance to tag along!

It wasn’t as hot as I expected, but it I still had a fabulous time exploring the museum and, my favorite pastime, posing for pictures!

Here are some highlights. If you want to see them all, check out my photo set on Flickr or on Facebook!

Wow, I think this has to be my favorite exhibit of all time. Who cares about the science, look how many of MEEE you can see!

Ummm, yeah. Clean enough to drink out of, but would you?

Look! Here you can see my electric personality!

Pretty crystals!

Read Mindy’s blog to find out how to make your own crystals at home!

Elegant? Worm? You gotta come find out about this!

Woooooo Heeeeee! I'm an astronaut!

Yeah, I'm looking at you! ... hey... quit staring!

Does this contraption detect glowing personalities?

Who Says Small Can’t Be Powerful?

When I was young, I remember hearing the words “good things come in small packages” over and over again. (Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I was the youngest of the family, and the shortest among my peers.) Back then I had my own concept of small — a puppy, kitten, a piece of candy, a diamond ring. And I always rooted for the smallest, seemingly weakest, and fell in love with the runts of the litters.

In today’s world, the concept of small has taken on an entirely new meaning, and I am fascinated with it. Things so small you can’t even see them in a microscope, in fact you can’t see them with anything, because light doesn’t work when things get that small. The only way to “see” or study these objects is to feel them with other tiny tiny objects. Scientists need special tools and equipment to work on the nanoscale, because regular tools like scissors are way too big! This is the world of nanotechnology.

Learn all about the tiny tiny tiny world all around us at Nanotechnology: What's the Big Deal

Nanotechnology focuses on things that are measured in nanometers, like atoms and molecules, which are the basic building blocks of our world. Scientists and engineers study this tiny tiny world and make new materials and tiny devices. With nanotechnology, they can make things such as smaller, faster computer chips and new medicines to treat diseases like cancer.

So, if you can’t see a nanometer and you need special tools to “feel” them and work with them, just how small is it? It’s a hard concept to grasp, so hopefully this activity will give you a better idea.

Materials

• Paper ruler (download PDF here)
• Scissors
• Book
• Human hair
• Your finger

Just how small is a nanometer?

The paper ruler you downloaded is 20 centimeters long — a fifth of a meter. Do you think you can cut it down to a nanometer in size? Cut it in half so you have a piece that’s 10 centimeters long. Keep cutting the ruler in half as many times as you can. How small a piece can you get before you can’t cut it any more?

I bet you didn’t manage to cut the paper ruler down to a nanometer! A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. That’s really small! Most people can’t cut the paper smaller than about a millimeter. (The lines on the ruler mark millimeters.) A nanometer is a million times smaller than that!

Pick up  your book and look at the thickness of an individual page. On average, pages are about 100,000 nanometers thick. Pull out one of your hairs and look at it. A very fine human hair is about 10,000 nanometers wide, which is the smallest thing we can see with the human eye. Now, look at your fingernail. It grows about one nanometer per second.

Credits and rights: This activity was adapted from: “Education and Outreach: Cutting It Down to Nano,” developed by the National Science Foundation-supported Internships in Public Science Education (IPSE) Educator Resources, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center on Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The original activity is available at mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/IPSE/educators/activities/supplements/cuttingNano-Handout.pdf. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ESI-0532536.

Some information and graphic picked up from Northwestern University’s Discover Nano and from nanowerk.com.

This is the first in a series of Nano-related activities. Stay tuned on Tuesdays for more Nano activities as well as other topics such as dissecting your speech and the strength of shapes. For activities already published in this blog, look under the Categories menu to the right and select “Try this at home!“