This typical Living Wisdom School Science Fair was held in a beautiful garden in Mountain View. The remarks that accompany the photos are by science teacher Doug Andrews. For an in-depth conversation with Doug about science at LWS, follow this link.
Nakai, 5th Grade. “Nakai is a very bright student. For her experiment, she looked at different designs for creating match rockets. To make a match rocket, you put match heads inside aluminum foil and wrap the foil around the stick of the match, then you heat the end so that it ignites and creates a rocket. Some of her rockets were fairly refined, with fins, and so on. She did an excellent job. Her presentation was beautiful, and she thoroughly deserved her special award. Nakai was in 5th grade this year.”Jasmine, 7th Grade. “Jasmine has many animals in her life, so it was a natural choice that she trained chickens to recognize one color over another. “By classical conditioning, she was able to get the chickens to recognize that there would be food when they saw a red color. And because of their conditioning, the chickens would not go to food if it was on the white color! It fit very well with our life science lab, where we studied a unit on behavioral conditioning. You can see that her display has a very nice barnyard look – it’s pretty cool!”Finn Van Bunow, 7th Grade. “Finn will be in 6th grade this year. He’s very bright, and he progressed by leaps and bounds this year. Finn determined the relationship between potential energy and the length of a rubber band. It was a physics project, very well-constructed, and he did a fine job of articulating his experiment using statistics and pictures. Finn earned a special ribbon, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he’ll do this year.”Vivek compared the efficiency of wind power and water power as renewable energy resources. What was really cool is that he created a windmill to drive a generator and worked it out mathematically in great detail. Vivek’s parents are MDs or PhDs and are very loving and supportive. He definitely deserved his special award.Andrew, 8th Grade. “Andrew is very bright. He did a demonstration involving visual illusions, asking if a cat is going up or down the stairs.”Aadi, 4th Grade. “Aadi did a really good job of demonstrating the corrosive effects of various sweetened beverages on human teeth. A difficult part of the experiment was locating enough teeth to study, but Aadi somehow found a source. (I don’t want to pry into where he found the teeth!) “He compared sweetened carbonated beverages, a sweetened non-carbonated beverage, and plain water. It was a very good experiment, very well presented, and Aadi did a great job.”“This is Diana, who’s part of the 3rd grade experiment with volcanoes. She’s in the process of measuring vinegar, with her mom’s help. Her family are from Russia, and she could not be brighter.”“This is Diana again.”“Our most popular science fair experiment demonstrated the gravitational force that ice cream exerts on elementary-age children. The photo shows Helen Purcell, our principal, pouring chocolate syrup.”Hiroki, 6th Grade. “Hiroki did a comparison of favorable and unfavorable soil types for growing plants. He did a great job.”Akshay, 4th Grade. “Akshay is clearly enthusiastic about his project. Food-based experiments are always popular, because the students can bake cookies and share them, while studying which recipe works best, and why. “It’s not just an excuse to make tasty treats, because the kids have to follow the scientific method very strictly. Akshay did a fine job of studying the effect of temperature on the quality of whipped cream. The result showed that the colder the temperature, the better the whipped cream.”“The photo shows me giving Finn von Bunow his well-deserved special award.”“Finn’s proud mom, Melissa, takes his photo.”Keshav is a golfer, so it was natural for him to study golf balls. Manufacturers advertise their golf balls as traveling farther because of the way they’re made, and Keshav tested and compared various models to see if the claims are true. Keshav is a mathematician by inclination, and you can see that he generated plenty of statistics to support his work. It was a fine experiment and a really excellent presentation.Finn Menutti, 8th Grade. “Finn created a mass spectrometer using off-the-shelf materials. He had to study what parts go into a mass spectrometer, including a laser. He got the parts from the Internet and from stuff he had lying around. “He interfaced the homemade spectrometer with his laptop and used it to detect the presence of oil in water, in concentrations that allowed him to create data. The idea was to create a method for detecting water pollution. Finn did an excellent job and won a special award.”Kundavi, 8th Grade. “Kundavi created a magnetic train using a coil with a current running through it. It was a very good project, and she did a lot of good work on her presentation.”Vince, 4th Grade. “Vince is a very bright fellow. His demonstration showed how the human eye perceives two colors differently when they’re blended by rapid motion. Vince used a standard electric drill to spin a disk imprinted half with one color and half with another. When the disk was spun, the viewer perceived a third color that was the result of blending the two colors. It was a demonstration that involved physics and human perception. The smile on Vince’s face tells us that he did an excellent job.”Faroz, 5th Grade. “Faroz gave a physics demonstration of a structure called a Gauss Rifle. The formal definition of a Gauss Rifle (also called a Coil Gun) is: ‘a type of projectile accelerator consisting of one or more coils used as electromagnets in the configuration of a linear motor that accelerate a ferromagnetic or conducting projectile to high velocity.’”Quincy, 8th Grade. “Quincy’s project asked which color of cereal box makes you want to eat more cereal. It was a fairly simple project for Quincy, because he has an excellent mind, but he created an outstanding presentation. There are people who get paid lots of money to study customer psychology, and it’s not beyond reason that Quincy could be one of those people someday.”3rd Grade Students. “I always have the 3rd graders in teacher Ruth Silver’s class do a group experiment, because it’s unlikely that they could conceive, complete, and demonstrate a project by themselves at that age. This year, each student made a volcano. “In studying volcanos, there’s a great deal of learning about earth science, including plate tectonics, volcanology, and so on. We used the scientific method to compare the quality of the eruptions. I’m guessing the volcano in the picture is using Coke and Mentos as an eruption fuel. We also used baking soda and vinegar, and hydrogen peroxide and yeast. “It was lots of fun, and it shows that the kids can have a great time while they’re learning serious science. They did a good job, and when I see the kids with smiles on their faces, I know things are going well.”Serena, 6th Grade. “Serena did a comparative study of the purity of various waters. She measured the purity of water after it was passed through various commercial filters, and then she tried to see if she could create a filter that would equal the quality of the commercial filters. It was a challenging project. Serena was in 6th grade this year.”Elizabeth, 8th Grade. “Serena’s sister, Elizabeth, did a demonstration based on the fact that the human brain equates colors with hot or cold temperatures. For example, we think of red as hot and blue as cold. And if you print a “cold” number in red text, and a “warm” number in blue text, people will often assume that the cold number printed in red is warmer. It was a very interesting experiment!”Vidushi, 6th Grade. “I’m looking forward to seeing what Vidushi will do with her life, because she has great potential. Vidushi created a controlled environment to test the effect of colors on plant growth. She used filters to block all the colors of the spectrum except one. For example, the filter might block all colors but blue. She then studied the effect that each color had on how a plant would grow – and there was quite a difference! Surprisingly, she found that plants could grow quite well in red light.”Joseph, 4th Grade. “Joseph did a great-looking presentation on the human physiological response to various types of music – by measuring changes in blood pressure, heart rate, and so on. “The experiment involved a great deal of learning about the scientific process. For example, when you’re working with human subjects, there’s always an issue of how you need to choose your subjects. The students have to understand that you can’t just take a random sampling, but you have to confine it by age, gender, previous experience, and so on. This is the core of science education, teaching kids about the scientific method, and how to apply it rigorously and creatively.”
