Maxwell’s First Equation: Like charges repel; opposites attract. The proton has a positive charge, the neutron has no charge (neutron, neutral get it?) and the electron has a negative charge. These charges repel and attract one another kind of like magnets repel or attract. Like charges repel (push away) one another and unlike charges attract one another. Generally things are neutrally charged. They aren’t very positive or negative, rather have a balance of both.
Materials: balloon
Maxwell’s Second Equation: All magnets have two poles. Magnets are called dipolar which means they have two poles. The two poles of a magnet are called north and south poles. The magnetic field comes from a north pole and goes to a south pole. Opposite poles will attract one another. Like poles will repel one another.
Materials: magnet you can break or cut in half, scissors or hammer (depending on the size of your magnet)
Maxwell’s Third Equation: Invisible magnetic fields exert forces on magnets AND invisible electrical fields exert forces on objects. A field is an area around a electrical, magnetic or gravitational source that will create a force on another electrical, magnetic or gravitational source that comes within the reach of the field. In fields, the closer something gets to the source of the field, the stronger the force of the field gets. This is called the inverse square law.
Materials: balloon, magnet, small objects like paper clips or iron filings
Maxwell’s Fourth Equation: Moving electrical charges (fields) generate magnetic fields AND changing magnetic fields generate electrical fields (electricity). We’re going to do a couple of experiments to illustrate both of these concepts.
Magnetic fields are created by electrons moving in the same direction. A magnetic field must come from a north pole of a magnet and go to a south pole of a magnet (or atoms that have turned to the magnetic field.) Iron and a few other types of atoms will turn to align themselves with the magnetic field. Compasses turn with the force of the magnetic field.
If an object is filled with atoms that have an abundance of electrons spinning in the same direction, and if those atoms are lined up in the same direction, that object will have a magnetic force.
Materials: magnet wire, nail, magnet, compass, 12VDC motor, bi-polar LED, D-cell battery, sandpaper
Light acts like both a particle and a wave, but never both at the same time. But you need both of these concepts in order to fully describe how light works.
Energy can take one of two forms: matter and light (called electromagnetic radiation). Light is energy in the form of either a particle (like a marble) or a wave that can travel through space and some kinds of matter (like a wave on the ocean). You really can’t separate the two because they actually complement each other.
Low electromagnetic radiation (called radio waves) can have wavelengths longer than a football field, while high energy (gamma rays) can destroy living tissue. Light has wavelength (color), intensity (brightness), polarization (the direction of the waves that make up the light), and phase.
Materials: sink or bowl of water, glow in the dark toy, camera flash or sunlight
A fundamental concept in science is that mass is always conserved. Mass is a measure of how much matter (how many atoms) make up an object. Mass cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change form.
Materials: paper, lighter or matches with adult help
First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is conserved. Energy is the ability to do work. Work is moving something against a force over a distance. Force is a push or a pull, like pulling a wagon or pushing a car. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can be transformed.
Materials: ball, string
Second Law of Thermodynamics: Heat flows from hot to cold. Heat is the movement of thermal energy from one object to another. Heat can only flow from an object of a higher temperature to an object of a lower temperature. Heat can be transferred from one object to another through conduction, convection and radiation.
Temperature is basically a speedometer for molecules. The faster they are wiggling and jiggling, the higher the temperature and the higher the thermal energy that object has. Your skin, mouth and tongue are antennas which can sense thermal energy. When an object absorbs heat it does not necessarily change temperature.
Materials: hot cup of cocoa
Pure substances all behave about the same when they are gases. The Ideal Gas Law relates temperature, pressure, and volume of these gases in one simple statement: PV = nRT where P = pressure, V = volume, T = temperature, n = number of moles, and R is a constant.
When temperature increases, pressure and volume increase. Temperature is basically a speedometer for molecules. The faster they are wiggling and jiggling, the higher the temperature and the higher the thermal energy that object has. Pressure is how many pushes a surface feels from the motion of the molecules.
Materials: balloon, freezer, tape measure (optional)
There are three primary states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.
Solids are the lowest energy form of matter on Earth. Solids are generally tightly packed molecules that are held together in such a way that they can not change their position. The atoms in a solid can wiggle and jiggle (vibrate) but they can not move from one place to another. The typical characteristics that solids tend to have are that they keep their shape unless they are broken and they do not flow.
Liquids have loose, stringy bonds between molecules that hold molecules together but allow them some flexibility. Liquids will assume the shape of the container that holds it.
Gases have no bonds between the molecules. Gases can be squished (compressed), and pure gases all behave the same way. (We’re going to learn more about this with the Ideal Gas Law.)
Materials: can of soda or glass of water
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There are 18 scientific principles, most of which kids need to know before they hit college. With the content in this unit, you’ll be able to quickly figure out what they know and where the gaps are, so you can focus on the areas you need to most.
Once kids have wrapped their heads around these ideas, they can pretty much explain the universe around them, including why airplanes fly, how electricity works, and why socks disappear in the dryer.
Don’t worry if these ideas are new to you – it may have been that no one has ever explained them to you or how important they are. The content in this unit is just a quick overview of what we’ll be learning in the main e-Science Online Learning program. The content in this program can be stretched over several years, so don’t try to cover it all in one night.
You’ll be able to tell when your child has mastered these principles in the way they describe how things work when they teach these ideas to others.
One of the most important things you can do as parents is to focus on the long-term outcome (how to think like a scientist), not how quickly you can get your child to memorize these top principles.
Scientists do real science by being patient observers, getting curious about the world around them, and asking questions.
There seems to be a predominant myth about scientists: that real scientists put on a white lab coat, walk into their lab, and have an ah-HA! moment about how to cure the common flu or invent warp drive and then fame and fortune follows (along with a wild hairdo).
That’s not the way real scientists do science. In fact, nothing could be further from reality.
Real scientists are everyday folks that have a curiosity mindset (How does that work? Why did that happen? What’s really going on here?) and are really good at watching the world around them. They see things in ways most people overlook. Why are things overlooked? Either because they are too busy or just weren’t trained to think like a scientist.
Thinking like a scientist is a way you train your mind to focus on how you can make things better for people or the planet. It’s a way of contributing while at the same time challenging yourself to understand something that you didn’t just a moment ago. It’s fun to figure things out if they are not too far out of reach. Just as you wouldn’t teach a toddler to sky-dive, we wouldn’t start you on your science adventure with stuff that too complicated to understand. We’ll make sure to go at your pace and throw enough solid content your way so you grow in order to keep up.
One of the quickest ways to kill your child’s passion for science is to not teach him how to deal with frustration when it pops up. If you’re anxious about doing science because you don’t want him to ever feel frustrated while doing science, let me tell you the good news up front:
SCIENCE CAN BE FRUSTRATING! This is especially true if you’re doing an experiment right in front of other people.
While every scientist gets to feeling frustrated or disappointed at times, they also don’t stay there long. When an experiment goes awry, or something doesn’t work, it’s important to work through these emotions (and events) with your child so they get into the habit of picking themselves up, brushing themselves off, and getting back in the saddle. What this usually means is taking a closer look at your experiment setup, your original ideas and guesses and see what happened.
Everyone gets frustrated. It’s part of life, part of reality. What’s not realistic is letting frustration stop you, or even reliving the same frustration over and over in your mind. That’s not how the real world operates. Everyone experiences setbacks, and the sooner your child figures out how to deal with these, the more resilient they are going to be and the faster they’re going to learn what works and what doesn’t.
In fact, one of the greatest experiments of all time gave a null result, which baffled top scientists for decades until Einstein came to the rescue with his special theory of relativity. It was the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment that failed to detect the Earth’s motion through the ‘ether’. It’s good thing, too, because now we know the truth Einstein’s relativity principles that tell us the speed of light being constant for all observers (we’ll cover more of that in Unit 7).
We’re going to focus on the top scientific principles that will make you a brainiac extraordinaire. You might be surprised at the materials or experiment setup. But real science doesn’t need to be fancy – you can demonstrate all of these spades of science for dirt cheap. Ready?
Scientists study motion. They study how things move through space and time in order to understand and predict the world.
The Principles of Galilean (Newtonian) Relativity are where Einstein’s original principles of relativity came from. The ideas that “I am at rest” don’t mean anything unless you talk about your motion relative to something else.
There is a natural state of motion to move at constant speed in a straight line. When you toss a ball, it wants to go in a straight line. But air resistance (drag) and gravity are working to bring it to a stop. Launch a Voyager spacecraft into space and it goes in a straight line until it hits something or is gravitationally affected by another object.
Newton’s three laws of motion (which are based on Galileo’s work) make all motion predictable once we know all the forces acting on the object:
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If you’re struggling to untangle the confusion about significant digits, then this is the video you’ll want to watch. Get a calculator, sheet of paper, and a pencil and get ready to become a super-genius on sig figs!
Have you ever torn apart something and then couldn’t figure out how to get it back together again so that it worked? Worse, you knew that if you had only taken a few moments to think about the problem or jot something down, you know it would have taken you far less time to figure it out?
If you’ve used the Scientific Method, you know how cumbersome it can be at times, and to be completely honest, it really isn’t the right tool for every problem in science. While I’ve mentioned the UTP before, I haven’t actually given you the exact steps to follow… until now.
Here’s a great way to explain how this works: first, you need the right starting position. Imagine if I pulled a single card out of a deck of playing cards and asked you to guess what it is. At first, you might start by randomly guessing any card that comes to your ind, but after while, you forget which you have already guessed and which you can’t tried yet. Sound frustrating? It is. Sound inefficient? It is. This is what it’s like to do a science experiment without tracking your progress. It’s insane, and yet people do it all the time. No wonder they find science frustrating!
