Year 7 Science with Mr Simpson

A fantastic program out of Pittsburgh, USA, that encourages girls to explore maths, science, engineering and technology – in their own words, using technology. GirlTalk Radio is a series of interviews with edgy women scientists, conducted by girls aged 11 – 16.

This is an awesome inititative that could be something we look at doing here in Australia. For the moment, have a listen to what these amazing young women have put together!

GirlTalk Radio: http://www.braincake.org/girltalk/GirlTalkAbout.html
click on the ‘Start Broadcast’ link on the page to start exploring the site.

If you haven’t read a Popular Science magazine – here’s your chance!

In their own words:

“We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”

Search for computer, digital camera, mobile phone or any other vaguely scientific or technological term and see what comes up – you may be suprised!

Check it out:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/06/1937255/Popular-Science-Frees-Its-137-Year-Archives

Wow! Today we had an awesome practical class! Well done to every student who contributed to getting the task done in such a thorough and efficient way.

Using the Vernier Temperature probes and the Logger Lite program allows us to measure changes in temperature much more precisely than were able to in the experiment conducted last week.

Another benefit of the program is that not only does it record more accurately, it can record vastly larger amounts of data – in today’s experiment we measured the temperature every second for almost 10 minutes – this is 100 times more data than we collected last time!

Are there any other benefits of using the digital probe? Did it affect safety at all?

Each of you in 7G have saved your data into your personal files on the network. In the next day or so we are going to print this data out and include it in your very first practical report.

I hope you enjoyed the class today – I plan to do similar experiments again soon.

Writing practical reports can seem a bit daunting at first but rest assurred, by the end of the year you will have become quite good at it!

When we have finished a practical experiment I will often (but not always) ask you to write up your experiment in a format that allows me to see what you have done during the experiment, how you overcome any hurdles, what equipment you used – just to name a few things. The report will also allow any other scientist to reproduce your experiment in exactly the same way and, hopefully, get the same results.

All practical reports contain the following sections, in this order:

Title, Date, Aim, Hypothesis, Safety Considerations, Materials, Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusion.

This information can be found in more detail in this document: prc_PracticalProforma

There is also this document – graphicorganiser_ScientificReportDiscussionOrganiser

This document will help specifically with the discussion section of the practical write-up which often can catch students up.

Late last week we completed a practical experiment on boiling water.

You had the opportunity to set up just a small sample of the scientific equipment that we will be using during the year.

What I want you to do today is to copy the following questions into your exercise books and answer them in as much detail as you can:

1. At what temperature did the water boil?

2. Was this as you expected? Explain.

3. What environmental conditions may have impacted on your results? 

4. Did you make any errors? Did you make any mistakes? What’s the difference between these?

5. Describe the data that you collected. Imagine that only you can see the numbers, how would they ‘look’ to someone else?

6. What would you do next to improve your experiment?

Go home and speak to your parents about the practical experiment, they may have some ideas to help with the above questions.

Okay.

Which boils first, salt water or fresh water?

Have a think about this question and come up with an answer – don’t forget to have a reason for why you think your answer is correct.

Done that?

The ‘why‘ that you’ve come up with is called a hypothesis – a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon.

In other (less scary) words, you saw something happen and your hypothesis is your belief on why that something happened.

Every time we conduct an experiment from now on, I want you to formulate a hypothesis to explain to others what you see and why you think it is happening.

Hey team!

Hopefully you are going to find the resources on this blog useful in your studies this year.. Feel free to make comments, ask questions, watch the videos or listen to the songs that I post on here.

All comments will be moderated by me (for your own safety) before they get posted so don’t stress if you don’t see your comment immediately, I’ll get it up on the blog ASAP.

Feel free to show your parents what you’re doing in class by getting them onto this site – hopefully by the end of the week we’ll be able to show them a video of our first experiment!

Happy hunting!

Mr Simpson

Your challenge is this – watch the movie that is in the ‘Forces’ link section (or here) and answer the following questions in your exercise book using full sentences:

1. Why does the man say that a ‘stable foundation’ is required? What would happen if you did this on sand?
2. What forces are acting on the anvil before the fuse is lit?
3. What forces are acting on the anvil as it shoots up into the air? (Think carefully, there are at least 4 – maybe more!)
4. What would you do if you had to try and beat this attempt for height achieved by a shooting anvil?

 Good luck! This is due in our Science class next Wednesday.

Mr Simpson

Finding resources online can be daunting. Simply going to a search engine like Google or Yahoo and typing in the topic can reveal hundreds of thousands of websites. Some of these will be very useful and some will be totally useless.

 The challenge that faces you when researching anything (not just what’s online but also what’s in the library, what you can find out from your parents, what you read in the newspaper) can be summed up in the following points:

• Do you understand what it says? Don’t simply cut and paste information from websites into your documents. Check that you understand what it is saying. Your teachers actually read your work and they know if your vocab is strong enough to contain words such as ‘disambiguation’.
• Is it true? The old saying, “Don’t always believe what you read”, is especially true now that the Internet has allowed us access to such vast amounts of information. Some of it is true, some of it is only half true and some of it is down-right wrong.  The best way to verify the reliability of information that you research is to make sure that multiple places say the same thing. For example, if a book from the library, a website online and your mum all say the same thing about a topic – you can be safe in assuming that it’s true.
• Is the information up to date? Make sure that the information you find during your research is up-to-date. Again, verify it from multiple sources.
• Sometimes, it’s simply best to ask someone. Don’t rely on the Internet for everything. Sometimes, your parents/brothers/sisters/grandparents/neighbours, will be the best resources that you have. Save time (and energy) – start a conversation with your parents. It may suprise you how much they actually know.

 Good luck!

Mr Simpson