Month: December 2012

Cooking with Kuiper: Project Supply ChartCooking with Kuiper: Project Supply Chart

All Lined Up for Comet Building

All Lined Up for Comet Building

(Update:  2/18/2015)

As mentioned in the notes for project leaders, it’s best to repeat the procedure at least twice–three times if the class is large, to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate in the “safe” portions of the activity and to produce a variety of comets to observe.

Purchase dry ice in advance by as much as a day (purchase at the higher end of the quantity range if you need to store it overnight) and  store wrapped in insulating material, but not  tightly sealed.  (Frozen CO2 will sublime to gas and can even explode a container that is sealed too tightly.)  A small non-airtight cooler tucked into another lightly-closed, non-airtight cooler works fine, especially if wrapped in a blanket and stored in a cool location.

For the ice-cream topping, choose a small bottle with a squirt-style top full of caramel- or chocolate-flavor syrup for ice-cream sundaes.  Do NOT purchase hard-shell toppings;  stick to sticky sugar syrups.  Be prepared to fend off requests to sample the syrup.

For ammonia, do not use pure ammonia;  simply choose a basic non-sudsy ammonia-based cleanser.  A “sport-top” (squirting-style) water bottle about half-full of ammonia works well and keeps the ammonia away from hands, eyes, and clothing.  However, be sure to clearly label the bottle with the contents.

For trash bags, choose a good, sturdy brand.  They’ll take significant abuse!

Please note carefully that most equipment is required to be either plastic or wood.

  Per comet

For about 3-4 comets, allowing for waste and failures

 

Estimated cost

(2015 prices)

Good sturdy “tall kitchen” garbage bag, cut down one long edge to make a liner for the bowl 1

2

(have a second on hand in case the original tears)

$0.50

($12 for box of 45)

Additional “tall kitchen” garbage bags

3

Open the bags and layer them one inside the other, to create a triple-thick bag

6

Have a second layered set of 3 bags on hand in case of tears

$1.50

($12 for box of 45)

Large plastic mixing bowl, 2-cup plastic measuring cup, tablespoon measure, large wooden spoon

1 of each

Reminder:  for safety, use plastic containers and a wooden spoon

1 of each Bring from home or borrow from volunteers
Water 2 cups

2 quarts on hand

(store in a pitcher for measuring out in 2-cup quantities)

n/a
Sand or fine gravel 2 tablespoons ½ cup zero
Ammonia 

One squirt (about 1 tablespoon)

 

½ cup

$1.50

($10 for 28-ounce bottle)

Ice-cream topping

One squirt (about 1 tablespoon)

 

About ½ cup (Bring at least a 4-ounce container of syrup.) $6.50
Dry ice 2 cups of dry ice, after crushing. About 7-10 pounds of dry ice. $15($1.50 per pound)
Safety goggles

1 pair, adult size

1-2 pair, adult or child size (depending on student age)

1 pair, adult size

1-2 pair, adult or child size (depending on student age)

If not available in classroom—one-time purchase for reuse in many projects. $5 each

 

Heavy work gloves 1 pair, to fit Project Leader 1 pair, to fit Project Leader Use own gloves or borrow from volunteer (a new pair would cost about $10-12)
Total Cost: $39.50

For an easy-to-print version:  Just Supplies Cooking with Kuiper

Cooking With Kuiper: Notes for Project LeadersCooking With Kuiper: Notes for Project Leaders

(update:  2/18/2015)

Last week on the tvweb, this happened: astronomer Derrick Pitts turned up once more on “The Late Late Show”.  And even though science-loving Craig Ferguson has moved on to new horizons, Director Pitts stayed and showed Guest Host Wayne Brady how to make a comet.  So I looked back at my entries for this project and realized they need some updates, and particularly some visuals. Have patience–it’s a multi-entry blog feature, so look for two more entries for the complete Updated Edition of “Cooking With Kuiper.”

The Kuiper Belt–that donut-shaped aggregation of hundreds-of-thousands of rocky objects orbiting beyond Neptune–is one of the most interesting regions of the Solar System just now.  Just last year, NASA’s Deep Impact explorer hurled a probe into the surface of Comet Tempel 1, flinging up a curtain of debris to reveal more about the comet’s composition.

Deep Impact's probe sent back this image just before striking Comet Tempel 1 (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD)

Deep Impact’s probe sent back this image just before striking Comet Tempel 1 (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD)

NASA’s New Horizons mission is due to arrive in July 2015 at Pluto–the most famous Kuiper Belt object–to observe the newly-redesignated dwarf planet and its five moons and then head out to explore.  You can check in on the progress of the mission at NASA’s home for New Horizons.  There is a general agreement among astronomers that the comets which return again and again (periodic comets)  began in the Kuiper belt.

In this project, we’ll be building a model of a comet using household supplies to represent most of the comet’s components and dry ice to capture the icy-cold environment of the Kuiper Belt.   While most Messy-Monday projects are entirely hands-on this particular activity is meant as a demonstration with controlled audience participation.  Some students may be careful enough to work with dry ice…but too many are not, and the step at which the dry ice is added can be dynamic and unpredictable.

A study of comets draws in much of what students should know about their planetary system and extends that knowledge into new and intriguing areas.  Students in intermediate grades probably know the basics of comets…that they come from the far reaches of the solar system, that they have tails, and that a comet crashing into the earth makes a cool disaster movie.  They might be surprised to know that scientists still want to find out more about comets, because all we know about comets so far is from watching them on their travels through the solar system.  Just a few months ago, the Rosetta spacecraft launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency actually landed a robotic explorer named Philae on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, so why not launch an investigation into the nature and structure of comets by building our own lumpy, irregular, gas-spewing comets?

This activity is best paired with at least one hands-on activity centering on comets.   The second activity in this series combines a crafting-style model construction project and a cometary motion simulation game.  Other resources can provide other activities.  For instance, students can make a flip-book illustrating a short-period comet’s behavior as it travels from the orbit of Neptune to the sun and back.  And users of Pixel Gravity can run a simulation of the comet impact which led to the demise of the dinosaurs.

In the next installment, we’ll assemble a supply list for this project.  I recommend you  plan to build at least two comets, to let more kids participate and also to illustrate just how different two comets can be.

 

Messy Monday: Science Projects for Kids, Teachers, and Parent HelpersMessy Monday: Science Projects for Kids, Teachers, and Parent Helpers

Welcome to the first official posting under this new category.  In these installments, I’ll be sharing science projects developed over many years while serving as The Science Mom at my local elementary school and in a community after-school program.   When my friend Jean Southland and I first started the in-class projects, the teacher invited us in on Mondays, to create a fun activity for that worst-of-days to students, the First Day of the School Week.  We fooled around with ideas to give this extra science class a name and settled on Jean’s simple and inviting “Messy Monday”.  Since then, Jean moved on to wider-scale education duties, from teaching to administration, and she is now head of  a local charter school.  In the meantime, I continued with developing classroom-scale science projects and coaching a small robotics team.

When the youngest of my kids finally moved on from elementary school and my geek needs were being satisfied by playing with robots, I felt twinges of guilt that I was leaving the next round of students in the lurch.  The most-frequent comments I heard when running science project sessions could be summarized as: “I could never do that”.  Sometimes it was the teacher, in which case she/he would mean  “I can’t spare the time to figure out supply lists, shop for stuff, sort out materials, and test procedures.”  Other times, it was another parent, in which case the meaning was either  “I could do that, if only someone would explain what it’s supposed to mean” or “I understand the science, but someone needs to give me a checklist to follow.”   And in these times, potential cost is always a concern, as most supplemental projects—from field trips to science experiments—end up being funded by parents or from teachers’ own pockets.

In these episodes, I’ll be having a stab at meeting both sets of needs.  With any luck, the end result will be a book of “recipes” for science projects with enough information provided for teachers to slot into their curricula in order to satisfy the science standards they must meet, with clear supply lists to distribute to classroom-helper parents, and with step-by-step instructions for completing projects that any interested parent or teacher will be able to not only follow but build upon to suit their own audiences.  While (like every other blog in the Known Universe) the ultimate result is to be a book of projects that a teacher or parent helper could have at hand, in the short term, there will be first, these erratic blog entries and second, a series of leaflet-style e-docs in a more readable/printable form, to be available from the usual e-book suppliers.  Think of the blog entries as the beta version, the leaflets as the Basic Edition release, and the eventual book as the Portmanteau Edition, with updates, extensions, and add-on packs as needed.

To open the subject, I’ll be delivering a flurry of quick posts to get things started, but then will back off to a more regular pace.  The goal is to deliver one project-worth of information in no more than two weeks.

Every Messy Monday project guide has four key components:

  •  A set of notes for project leaders, sketching the key elements of the project and the science topic it is meant to address
  • A detailed supply list, structured to make it simple to purchase supplies for either a one-shot demonstration or for a classroom-sized group activity.
  • A set of instructions for working through the project with students, including commentary to help cope with common classroom-management issues, questions that are likely to arise, and issues to keep in mind from safety to fairness.
  • A rough estimate of the cost to run the project.

So, let’s get started with a truly cometary project…