It’s true that I find some of my best experiment inspiration in the hardware store. My team often likes to tell the story about spending five hours at Home Depot before a conference in Atlanta… don’t believe everything you hear. This Teflon Tape experiment is one of my favorites because young scientists get to use a pretty common household material to make their own secret messages. Check out the video below, then read the experiment for the whole story.
Fill the glass jar with water and cover it with a card. As you turn the whole thing upside down, the audience can hardly contain themselves. The room quiets down as you precariously position the inverted jar and card a few feet above someone’s head. And yes, I love the look of terror on my “helper’s” face when I take the card out from under the jar. Watch the video below and read the experiment for a lesson on how to make some science magic.
It’s true that I have some favorite experiments that seem to make it into most of my workshops and presentations. It’s always nice to have a few “stand-bys” in my back pocket that I can use in case of a science emergency. But, it’s even more fun to come up with new variations for the standards. I was excited to introduce the Dancing Raisins experiment on 9News… with some fun new twists. Watch the video to check out the fun.
Editor’s Note: A special thanks to guest blogger and good friend, Jane Goodwin, for this “colorful” post!
Remember how Pollyanna loved to see the rainbows all along the wall? Do you remember how she did that?
She made those rainbows with prisms from an old lamp. Prisms are a kind of many-sided piece of glass, and when the light shines on them, they make rainbows!
Pollyanna made rainbows back in the olden days, and you can make rainbows right now! If you don’t have a prism, you can use a kitchen glass, or a gemstone, or even an ice cube! Almost any clear glass thing can be used as a prism as long as it isn’t completely flat.
If the sun isn’t shining, you can use a flashlight. Just position your prism so that the light shines through it, and there should be rainbows dancing on the opposite wall! If you hung a prism in your bedroom window, you would wake up to rainbows!
Ryan Byers, of Pocatello, Idaho, is making rainbows right in his living room, using a large prism from his huge rock collection. …
We now have over 100,000 subscribers who receive our Science Experiment of the Week in their inbox each Wednesday morning. We’ve had requests to create a widget (especially from teachers who blog), and we finally did it using Widgetbox. The widget is called Science Experiment of the Week from Steve Spangler. We think it’s a cool widget that shares both experiments and our featured videos.
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I’d really like to hear your feedback on how the widget works on your website.
