Spotty Blue Banana

A couple of years ago I saw a video that capture my interest in creating a water rocket to demonstrate how Newton’s Laws act, hence how a rocket works, and have a bit of fun in the process. Over the intervening period, I forgot about it again, until recently when I came across another example on a BBC television programme, Bang goes the theory (I’ll return to this in a later post).

The latter version of the rocket is somewhat simpler in design, and can easily be recreated.

The original example I now remembered was a bit more involved as a project, and takes a little longer to create. I dug out my early Make Magazines from the garage and found the instructions in there. You can also access them online.

1. Easier design

This is an informative page about the principles, and how to recreate the design with a video embedded.

2. More involved design

This design takes a little more time and effort, and leads to a more ‘explosive’ result.

These are the online instructions from the Make Magazine volume 5 that I’ve got. This is Steve Lodefink’s original design, and there is a video of Steve firing his rocket.

A later instructional video, by Kip Kay is less successful with the rocket, but gives you some pointers.

Additional

You can even have water rocket parties, where you get the kids to decorate their rocket how they want, before launching them, as demonstrated in this finkbuilt post.

The Squigly site has a few very nice games, split into maths, spelling/typing/reading, geography, memory and matching and making connections. Some time dependent games seem a little quick at first, but maybe with practise the kids will get quicker and more accurate.

Smarthistory is an interesting site (historically categorized into different periods) that not only displays images of over 200 art works, but have well informed, engaging discussions as embedded audio.

This site, Sixty Symbols, does for Physics and Astronomy what my last post, Periodic Table, did for Chemistry.

Links: Sixty Symbols dedicated site & YouTube channel

Based in San Francisco, the Exploratorium was founded by the famous physicist and educator Dr Frank Oppenheiner, who remained the director until his death in 1985.

I’ll be visiting the site again, and again and probably again; it’s got to great stuff on there.

However, today I’m interested in the After School section, which “brings hands on activities and digital library resources into afterschool play”.

There are well presented instructional videos telling you how to create the activity, how to engage children in the activity, and how to vary things and investigate the results.

What about having a representation of any atom in the Periodic Table, showing the spin of the electrons in the shells. Something like this:

Site link.

I came across this excellent site called abcteach. It is nicely categories and has so many worksheets for printing, lots of tools for handwriting, letter/word sorting, word searches, spelling, sudoku. For slightly older children there are maths and science, reading, writing, thinking skills, logic puzzles, and much more. I’d suggest having a good look around.

Here are some online games and logic puzzles that can help you with a bit of geography.

Thanks to Paul Wigfield for pointing me towards Sporcle. It has lots of puzzles to test yourself against the clock. I’ll be returning to it in the future. Here I’m interested in the one’s to help with learning about countries and geography. For example, you can name the countries in Europe

Countries of the World

US States

In a similar way you can use the Lufthansa virtual pilot game to test your knowledge of European city locations against the clock.

I came across these videos when I was looking out how a trebuchet works (as I mentioned previously). These are a series of videos on YouTube presented by “Steve Jones an experienced mathematics and science teacher”. As you can see from the screenshot they cover nuclear energy, Richter scale, electricity generators, and a few others.

I came across this site accidentally (whilst investigating trebuchets I clicked a link and ended up there), and boy am I glad I did. The site is called Hilaroad.com and has lots of projects to try, with instructions and video. It look very good.