After last year’s Science and Weather Day at Coors Field, the Colorado Rockies outfielders asked me to give them more of a challenge for a warm-up before the game. Last year, pitcher Jeff Francis and I launched potatoes with tricked out potato launchers. We shot the potatoes into the outfield.
For Science and Weather Day 2010, we will launch limes with our canons. The potato canons have an accelerant inside to help fire the limes into the outfield. Here’s hoping the limes will give the outfielders the challenge they need.
A popular activity for teachers each year is the “egg drop.” Each student gets an egg and some guidelines to make a container that will protect the egg and keep it from breaking when it is dropped from high in the air.
The teacher usually perches herself high atop the roof of the school and tosses the contraptions the kids have come up with to the ground as crowds of kids scream with delight. It’s great fun to hear the cheers and an occasional “darn!” when the egg drop engineers open their containers. This activity is a great lesson in critical thinking skills, problem solving and the physics of dropping an egg.
At Weather and Science Day on May 12th, 2010, students will test out their safe packaging skills to see if their egg will survive a 57 foot drop from the upper level of Coors Field.
Last year’s Weather & Science Day at Coors Field resulted in a new Guinness World Record for the Largest Physics Lesson. Thanks to support from the Colorado Rockies and 9News, the Steve Spangler Science team is excited to be a part of the 2nd Annual Colorado Rockies Weather and Science Day at Coors Field on May 12, 2010. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s in store for this year’s event.
The event is scheduled to kick-off at 10:30 a.m. when I’ll be joined by my good friend Kathy Sabine, meteorologist extraordinaire, from 9News (KUSA-TV in Denver). Over the years, I’ve subjected Kathy to every imaginable situation in an effort to create some new experience that makes science fun. This year, Kathy will share some of her best weather predicting secrets and teach us the science behind our most extreme weather in Colorado… and I’ll try not to blow her up.
“Every big science show deserves a few erupting concoctions and some really cool kabooms,” said Steve as he filled a large trashcan with liquid nitrogen. “But this is not going to be a sit-and-watch experience. Every person in the audience will
