Both of my sons are competitive soccer players. When you live in Phoenix, AZ and you see young athletes running and sweating on a hot day for a prolonged period of time, it is easy to conclude that they would benefit from a beverage with electrolytes and some sugar. The electrolytes replenish the salt that is lost in sweating, and can thus prevent muscle cramping, with the most important ion being potassium. Young competitive soccer players also have very little body fat, so the sugar gives their body energy.

I confess, I went through a Gatorade, PowerAde, and Propel stage for our boys. My oldest son prefers Gatorade, my youngest Propel, and PowerAde was often the least expensive. When I would grocery shop I would always stop on this aisle to see if there were bargains to be had, and then I would stock up. The drinks, made by either Coca-Cola or Pepsi, contain electrolytes and sugar so they seemed to be meeting these basic needs. I like the clearness of the Propel, in that I prefer to not have artificial colors sweating out of the pores of my children (which I never understood why Gatorade thought this was an appealing commercial). Tedd Gorden, of MSU, describes the pros and cons of different formulas for sports drinks.

On hot days with long games or practices, we would send our sons with a large water container and a bottle of a sports drink. Their bodies seemed to tell them what was best, and they always drank far more water than the sports drinks. I have now moved to natural alternatives, so our oldest son is drinking Martinelli apple juice (which he says is the best tasting and comes in a fun round bottle) and our youngest Welch’s grape juice from 10 oz containers. The juices are about the same prices as the 32 oz bottles of sports drinks. So per volume, they cost three times as much, but per outing they are about the same.

If you could design your own sports drink what would it have in it? This intriguing idea is used by Adaptive Curriculum to engage students in the Activity Object “Osmosis.” From this engagement, students examine red blood cells in isotonic, hypertonic, and hypotonic solutions. Then students place raw eggs with the shell removed into different unknown solutions and then label what the solution must be based upon the weight gain or loss in the eggs. The Activity Object has a great engagement with multiple strong interactions. And when it comes to sports drinks, hypotonic solutions are best, whether it is made by Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or grown on a tree.

One of the major themes that runs through many facets of science is the notion of surface area to volume ratio. I remember being a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya and using an experimental, guided-inquiry curriculum, inspired by the British Nuffield science program. Students made plasticine cubes of various sizes. I’m not sure why British people have an aversion to clay, but plasticine seems to be their school sculpting material. Then students measured the surface area of the cubes and calculated the volume. Then they calculated the surface area to volume ratio and discover that the larger the object, the smaller the surface area to volume ratio.

Which helps to explain many types of adaptations in biology and why individual cells can’t be the size of houses; they would simply not have enough surface area to absorb the materials they need, like oxygen, or to expel waste. From villi in the intestines to convolutions in the brain, our bodies have many adaptations to increase surface area.

Adaptive Curriculum has a guided inquiry Activity Object called “Surface Area to Volume Ratio in Organisms.” A clever engagement draws the students into the interactive experience. You have a plate of cheese with different size cubes that you are going to put into the microwave. But first, learners predict whether the large cubes or the small cubes will melt first.

Obviously, the small cheese cubes will melt before the larger ones. If you thought this, you have experienced a discrepant event. In actuality, the large cubes melt first. Since the microwave heats from the inside, the smaller cubes lose their heat faster than the large ones. The larger cubes, thus retain more heat and melt faster.  Discrepant events are powerful, because learners want to know why they were wrong.

From this, learners virtually change the size of cubes and see the changes in surface area, volume, and surface area to volume ratio. Then body sizes and shapes of animals are explored, as students learn about the implications of size and shape for heat loss.

My Peace Corps teaching and Adaptive Curriculum are different modes of guided inquiry and discovery learning, but both can help produce deep and life long learning.

Today, I am at NSTA in Philadelphia. A great city, and we have been having fabulous weather. My presentation today is on the Standards Based Science Fair. I am posting the PowerPoint for this presentation. NSTA 2010.SBSF

In a semi-darkened classroom at Coronado High School, the recessed computer projector shined down upon a slightly cushioned floor. David Birchfield, politely told me, “We only walk on that after we take our shoes off.” So I quickly jumped off. Ms. Mills and her physics class came in, and the students sat in chairs around the perimeter of the square mat, almost as though they were there for a martial arts exhibition.

Then the physics began. There was a handmade object that when you pushed a button it dropped its bottom. It had reflective tape so the mini-cameras around the room could pick up its motion and transmit it to a computer, which interpreted the data and then created dots on the mat to show the motion of the large object or the separated objects.

A student spun around in a circle and then pushed the button. The bottom sphere dropped and fell away from the object. From the dot pattern it was quite clear, and one student even said it spontaneously: “It moved away at the tangent.” No longer would these students have the misconception that a moving object would still hold the circular force because of its prior motion. Indeed, from Newton’s first law, it was apparent the straight-line motion of the object.

Students took turns trying it. Then to keep them engaged in their free exploration, there were a number of challenges issued, starting with “Let’s aim at Justin.” Then they aimed at a fixed target. Then at a target moving the same direction they were spinning, with a student walking and holding the target, and then at a target moving in the opposite direction.

After the class was over, I tried it as well, this time sans shoes. I have experienced the future, and it is on the floor. There is more power in an experience that is whole body, rather than just fingers on a keyboard or a mouse. Watching the physics class, there is also the learner interactions that make this a potentially powerful learning environment. To be sure, we will see applications like this in museums before it makes it into regular classrooms. Because it can be used with many content areas, some schools might have a SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab) for all their teachers to share. And no doubt the 3-D tracking system can be brought to use with interactive white boards, making their use more economical.

My thanks goes to Arizona State University’s David Birchfield, Kelly Phillips, Tatyana Koziupa, Mina Johnson, and Leanna Archambault for letting me experience the future. This will be a tool that will help students overcome misconceptions and experience science in a different way.

When it comes to science supplies, you can be sure that measuring devices such as stop watches, scales, rulers, and graduated cylinders will be useful. There is risk however in purchasing other materials, as you wonder will they work.

It all started well with my Sprout and Grow Window kits that I purchased for my elementary sciencemethods classes. They planted the generous supply of pea plant seeds that the kit provided. And in 5 of the 6 windows we had healthy germination. The plants looked neat growing up out of the thin plastic container housing the roots.

But the window idea paid no dividends. Although it was possible to see some small roots amid the very dark soil, it was disappointing how little you could actually see. I took one of the kits home to care for the plants. About one week after we started the kits, I planted the same pea plants in my home garden. Last week I took pictures of pea plants in the kit and in my garden. Our home telephone is put into each picture for scale.

Garden pea plants with phone at bottom

I know this is not a carefully controlled experiment. Nevertheless, clearly the outdoor garden plants did much better than the window indoor plants. Most people would guess that would be the case, even in a “winter” in Phoenix (where we have so far managed to avoid a seriously deadly frost). But without the benefit of being able to view the roots well, you have to wonder, why would you want to use the Sprout and Grow Window kits? So this review, gives these kits a rating of only 1 out of 4 test tubes. In other words, I don’t recommend that you purchase the product.

But it is nice that the pea plants they supplied grew so well outdoors. I have never grown peas before and I must confess I felt a connection to Gregor Mendel as I saw my plants rise up and flower. I even have pea pods starting to form. I think I will hold off on any genetic crosses for the time being but I think I might be up for a virtual experience at Adaptive Curriculum’s “Mendel’s Experiment.”

From the Activity Object "Mendel's Experiment" by Adaptive Curriculum

The videos on television show some of the massive destruction and the human toll of the recent earthquake in Haiti. It is difficult to imagine the suffering of the Haitian people. It is an unfortunate example of the devastation of a magnitude 7 earthquake.

It is natural to wonder why or how. When students are ready, teachers may want to discuss  earthquakes and their causes.

The folks at IRIS have a website with a PowerPoint presentation and Quicktime movie that explain a lot of details associated with this particular earthquake and earthquakes in general. The PowerPoint has excellent pictures of the destruction to buildings, without presenting images of human suffering that would be difficult for some students. The image to the right is taken from the PowerPoint.

IRIS (AKA the Incorporated Research Institutes for Seismology) has lots of resources for learning about earthquakes including SeisMac 2.0 which allows Macintosh computers to become seismographs.

In the quest for Science Literacy, we strive to give students an understanding of natural events before they happen. Adaptive Curriculum has two strong Activity Objects, one is on determining the magnitude of an earthquake and the other is determining the location of the earthquake. The image below is from “Earthquakes: Measuring Magnitude.“

When I was doing my sabbatical at the University of San Carlos (Cebu, Philippines), Ed Van den

Berg (one of the really great guys in science education), would have the undergraduate secondary education science students put on physics and chemistry demonstrations for the local school children. It was a delightful way to give them experience teaching and expose children to the interesting world of science. In the picture, two of my students demonstrate their fire tornado. (See http://www.west.asu.edu/rillero/philippines.htm for more of my photographs from the Philippines.)

In this YouTube video below, a similar program is described called “The Little Shop of Physics.”

Tonight, as I understand it, “After Armadeddon” will air at 8 PM on the History Channel. It does present interesting opportunities for science teachers to talk about student ideas and feelings related to future and past disasterous conditions on Earth. It is part of a week of disasters at the History Channel. Here is a description of the show:

Tuesday, January 05, 2010
After Armageddon: – 08:00-10:00 PM

What have past acts of destruction taught us about what will happen to mankind after the apocalypse? Is it inevitable that disaster will someday strike America on an unprecedented level? How has history prepared us? History’s most dramatic events–Hiroshima, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and others–are examined and analyzed with hard data gathered from their massive aftereffects. The disappearance of water and food supplies, the effects of deteriorated sanitation and health care on the remaining population, and the increased use of violence as a means of survival–all illustrate how societies have responded and survived.

I have an especially keen interest in this show as my son, Hy Rillero, spent just over two-weeks filming his segment, with many long days of work. I am hoping that much of his vignette survives the editing process for this two-hour special. No matter what happens it was a great experience for Hy to work with Director Stephen Kemp (Raw-TV). In Hy’s section, a respiratory virus has wiped out 80% of the US population and he chronicles his family’s quest to survive.  The photo is of Hy and his film mom and dad.

I had the good fortune last week of being a conference presider for Irfan Kula, a talented educational designer. His session was “I Love Symbiosis.” He emailed me his PowerPoint presentation, and I am presenting this here:  i-love-symbiosis-kula.

The electronic Ohaus scales that I ordered a few years ago are slowly dying. Only half the digits are readable on the numeric displays or in some cases there are no readable numbers. At NSTA in Phoenix, I stopped by the Ohaus booth and the representative was not surprised when I told her this. Unfortunately, she informed me, the scales have only a one-year warranty. From the initial lot we bought, half are unusable.

Using the scales in our science methods classes at Arizona State University, shouldn’t be taxing compared to ordinary high school, middle school, or elementary school use. So it surprised me that the LD50 (a biology term for half a population dying) was achieved so quickly. But maybe my expectations are out of line, our Honda Odyssey, my wife informed me today, has 170,000 miles on it. But a one-year warrant, really? That makes me wonder how confident the manufacturer is in their product.

I like how fast the electronic balances gave readings. No longer were drafts, fast walkers, or table shakers an issue in our classroom, as compared to the old reliable triple beam balance scales. I predicted the end to triple beam balances at the high school and an even quicker death to the elementary level pan balances. But, perhaps I was too hasty.

I am not sure if Ohaus scales are worse then others. The sales rep informed me that in the newer models, the problem has been addressed with the displays. That won’t benefit me; I will put my next order in with a different company. But she also told me of another issue that seems likely to affect most scales that are not top end. Adding too much weight can permanently damage the weighing device. Yikes! It seems like a common occurrence, especially when doing full inquiry experiences, that students would add too much weight. Indeed, it seems like there should be warning signs on the scales about maximum loads.And this brings up a final issue. Why is it that we can’t find good reviews of science apparatus? I have bought things that are great and things that are lousy; wouldn’t it be nice to have a place like CNET that helps us tell what is good and what is not. But if you have scale advice, please do leave a comment.