Every four years, the stakes get higher for figure skaters at the Olympics as they try to increase rotation in the air with their triple axels and quadruple toe loops. Figure skating is one of the most demanding sports at the Olympics.
It is a complicated skill with a lot of different motions. Skaters need to optimize a lot of different conditions – speed, force, vertical velocity and angular momentum. All with exact timing.
Angular momentum is an important piece of jumping in skating. It determines how fast a skater can rotate. The more angular momentum, the higher the potential to spin.
Skaters generate angular momentum by pushing off the ice with their skates.
Pushing off the ice also generates vertical velocity. Vertical velocity gets a skater high enough in the air to do the spin by producing forces from the jump during takeoff.
What happens is an action and a reaction. As the leg muscles contract and the leg pushes down against the ice, the ice creates a force that pushes back on the legs, creating vertical velocity. The more velocity a
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Delia Zepeda, a teacher at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Day School in Coconut Grove, Florida made science fun at the school’s Family Math, Science and Technology Night in January.
The school celebrated its third year of getting kindergarten to third graders excited about science, math and technology.
Mrs. Zepeda shared their experience with all of us at Steve Spangler Science, “the wind bags were a big hit. We had so much fun watching the parents trying to blow them up the wrong way, we finally felt sorry for them and our student volunteers showed them the correct method.”
We are honored to periodically host the Carnival of Education. Hats off to our good friend Jane Goodwin for all of her work on the latest Carnival. – editor
Welcome to the Carnival of Education, hosted right here at Steve Spangler Science! As all good teachers well know, the best education is the education that encourages us all to get down and dirty with it: in other words, touch it, feel it, experience it fully. Connect it with other things you know. Activate your schema! Textbooks are good, and full of fascinating and useful information. However, if one student is given a textbook reading assignment and nothing else, and another student is encouraged to get up after reading and APPLY what he just read by putting his/her hands into and on and around smelly, goopy, noisy, exploding, changing, growing things, guess which student is going to remember the lesson best? Guess which student is going to talk about the lesson at the dinner table that nig?t. Yeah, that’s what we THOUGHT you’d all say! AWESOME!
Here we go! Let’s walk around the lab and see what we’ve
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Activate your schema! Textbooks are good, and full of fascinating and useful information. However, if one student is given a textbook reading assignment and nothing else, and another student is encouraged to get up after reading and APPLY what he just read by putting his/her hands into and on and around smelly, goopy, noisy, exploding, changing, growing things, guess which student is going to remember the lesson best? Guess which student is going to talk about the lesson at the dinner table that nig?t. Yeah, that’s what we THOUGHT you’d all say! AWESOME!
