I asked my math camp kids what kind of experiments they did in in science class:
“none”
“we watch videos”
“we dissected a frog… on the computer”
“we were going to do lasers but there were no batteries”
I’m concerned!
@futurebird As a curious 8 year old I conducted my own clandestine experiment I named "Does It Burn?". I watched my mom use an aluminum pie tin in the oven, so I used that as my holder. I created a list of things to test: Dirt, rocks, kleenex, newspaper, glass, brown paper bag, stainless steel, aluminum, cast iron. Each with a hypothesis. I used my Dad's matches and tested, and safely guessed each outcome until aluminum. There I learned an aluminum sheet does not burn if held horizontally, but if turned vertically, bursts into big flames like paper scaring the heck out of an unprepared 8 year old. Frightened, I dropped it into the pie tin. Which I realized was also ALUMINUM!!! Even more frightened I dropped the flaming sheet and pie tin into the trash can lined with a brown paper bag. Oh NO! Brown paper bags burn! I was so frightened I blew it all out with one adrenaline infused breath, then dumped the whole thing into the stainless steel kitchen sink and turned on the water. I stopped my experiments on that day. Science is very exciting. I became a poet.
I think we should encourage kids to do experiments, I was a bit older when I got a chemistry set, lots of fun, still have various notes about what happens when chem x is mixed with chem y.
I want to do this more, the stem group I run is meant to have a practical science element to it, but I am stuck doing computing a lot of the time.
Hopefully that will change as I have lots of nice sciency stuff I want to do and help visitors to do too.
@zleap @pattykimura @futurebird The principal didn’t agree, the day we blew a hole in the middle of the soccer field.
