Activity 9 Supplement 1
Activity 9
Supplement 1
The
Saga of Sam's Lost Legion
And their Halleluiah House
The story of Sam is designed to show you
how you and your team can dream up, develop, test and demonstrate an original
educational device.
Reading what Sam did and practicing by
making a model of a house like the one Sam demonstrated to the class will show
you how to do Activity 9.
Activity 9 asks you to come up with an
original educational device, or modify one that already exists, something
A. Very
educational
B. Very fun to
work on
C. Very
challenging and
D. Very
inexpensive and "Green"
E. Very
Green" – meaning earth friendly
F. Safe for
people age 12 and over to operate
Why? The Center
wants the Student Research Reports we publish on our Website to be reproducible
anywhere on earth at low- or no-cost. We
hope this inspired those who view our site to come up with their own original
educational devices that our students in the USA can make. We hope we start a "viral
revolution," where we aren't "teaching" our students, but rather
letting them create lessons other students can use, and thus we hope to keep
everyone busy doing real science and real product development technology, and
not just memorizing stuff that other people have discovered long ago.
Here's the story
of one TEAM, led by Sam, and what they did to "educate" their
classmates about the value of insulating a home.
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Sam’s Halleluiah
House
I stood at my open door awaiting the first period
bell. Beautiful projects were lined up
around our science room. Rube Goldberg
machines dominated but there were three varieties of AirCars, two kites, an
airplane and three helium balloons. One group had even modified my
"Electric Pickle Lamp," so it would be safe for students to use. It was not very bright, it made funny noises,
and it smelled funny. I had to intervene
when someone said it reminded him of a certain guy in the senior class: Sam.
Sam lived a complicated life, and never seemed to
thrive in a usual academic setting. His
mom had placed him in my class because it had a kind of "sanctuary"
dimension, where "difficult" kids could feel comfortable and safe.
It turned out that Sam's TEAM, called The Lost Legion, was in grave danger of
missing graduation because Sam had not been able to work with them until a week
before the final deadline, which was today, "Final Friday."
Sam came along carrying a large cardboard
box. An electric cord dangled out of the
top.
"Can we show our project today?" he asked.
"Of course," I said. We had agreed two weeks before that his group
could do their demonstration of Final Friday, There was no way Sam would let
his group down. The whole class loved
Sam. It wasn't his fault that he was
always getting things mixed up. He was
born under a cloud, it seemed.
Just before the bell, Sam's team, Cashandra, Gale
and Craig rushed in, and together they began setting up on the center lab table
in the front. They seemed to move like a
precision drill team. When Sam war
"cooking," he could get amazing things done. The TEAM respected that, and cooperated.
My class came in, prepared to take their routine
notes in the last pages of their notebooks.
Gale would write data as Craig called it out, and Cashandra would run
the stop watch, turn the lamp on and off, and insert the "AC system"
when it was needed.
Just as I sent the attendance form to the office,
and the class had finished their routine notes (Lesson Title, Topic, Aim and
Motivating Question), Sam nodded that he was ready.
"Good morning!" he said. He looked great, transformed from the
bumbling, accident prone teen we were familiar with into a Public Speaker and
Skilled Educator.
"Today, we want to show you how insulating a
house can save you money, make you more comfortable, and help reduce greenhouse
gas emissions." You could see he
was on a roll!
"This model house is a bigger version of the
little paper houses me made when this course started. We made it one cubic foot below, and the
attic is half a cubic foot. That's about
55 liters, actually, on the inside. We
have a 100 Watt light bulb on the floor downstairs to heat the house, and we'll
be using ten identical ice cubes in a bowl as our AC unit.
"Cashandra will turn the heat on and off,
and Craig will monitor the temperature of the air in the house with his
thermometer up at the top of the attic.
There's an open floor in the attic, so hot air can get straight to the
thermometer. When we use the air
conditioning, we monitor the cooling process.
"Gale's at the whiteboard to write the
data. Please copy it into your
notebooks."
On the table was the cardboard house, with little
plastic windows. A door was painted on
the front of the house. An electric cord
ran from the back wall of the house to an extension cord plugged into the
wall. A pull chain at came out of a
little hole at the bottom of the door so Cashandra could turn the light on and
off.
"When we have found out how hot the house
gets in five minutes, and how cold it gets once we put the AC unit inside,
we'll know how our standard house operates."
Jack was the "brain" of this class, and
always sat in the middle seat. His hand was up.
"What do you use for insulation?" he asked. He was staring at the eleven slabs of blue
plastic foam lying to the side of the house.
Masking tape was holding some of the slabs together at the edges. Maybe they would unfold like privacy screen.
"Good question, Jack." Sam was ready. "We'll get to that once we collect you
benchmark data. "It's not very
complicated." He sat down, and
Cashandra called "Start!" to begin the observation.
The First activity, heating the house, began as
Cashandra clicked the stopwatch and a called "Start."
Light shone through the windows, and Craig called
out, "Starting temperature was seventy two degrees Fahrenheit."
"We got the thermometer at the dollar
store. It uses red alcohol instead of
mercury, and read in Fahrenheit," Sam explained. "We want to use cheap stuff, and write
temperatures in Fahrenheit so everyone will know what we mean,” He took a chair
and sat next to his little house.
The SI system of metrics still hasn't become
mandatory in the USA. I though Sam was
wise to use the cheap, safe thermometer and degrees everyone understands. Our classroom stays at 72OF all
year. The air in the model house started
out at our classroom's usual temperature.
Soon Cashandra called "Stop" and turned
off the lamp. Craig called out,
"Ninety- seven degrees Fahrenheit!" and Gale wrote
"Elapsed time 5 min. Start Temp.
72OF, End Temp. 97OF."
I heard the student's pens scrumpfing along.
Sam tilted the house back on its back wall, and
Cashandra inserted the AC bowl of ice.
"Start!" she cried, and clicked the
watch.
Craig announced, "Start Temperature: 91 degrees." Hot air had evidently
stayed high in the Attic. Being light,
it did not pour out of the bottom floor while the house was tilted back.
It seemed like a long time before Cashandra said
"Stop!" and Craig called to Gale, "Eighty-two degrees
Fahrenheit!" She wrote the notes in
the usual short form.
More scrumpfing of pens on paper.
Sam stood his place of authority next to the
house. "So in five minutes, the
temperature rose twenty-five degrees. No
insulation. It's likely that some of the
heat was lost through the walls and windows.
"Cooling for five minutes, the temperature
dropped nine degrees." He tilted
the house back again, and Cashandra handed him the bowl with the ten ice
cubes. "The ice cubes are down to
half size," he announced. Cashandra
nodded, took the bowl, and poured the contents into a pail.
"And now that we have our Benchmark Data, we
can begin our Controlled Experiments!
Here we introduce, 'The Independent Variable!'"
He opened the attic and tilted the house as
Cashandra fanned the used air out by waving a notebook at it. The fresh room air instantly replaced the old
air, returning everything to seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit.
Sam closed up the cardboard model house, setting
it straight on its floor and placing the attic securely on top of it. He smiled at Jack, and then with a flourish
he unfurled the walls of the house, four square plastic slabs with plastic
windows. They were hinged it took but a
moment for him to completely wrap the inner house with insulation. Cashandra took only a second to stick a wide
piece of masking tape across the edges where the walls met to fasten them in
place.
"And the roof and attic," Sam
said. With another dramatic move, he
swept up the two roof slabs and laid them on the cardboard roof. Craig had
quietly removed the thermometer, and stood by with it while Gale taped the two
ends of the attic in place. They were
attached at their bottom edges to the attic's floor insulation. In less than two minutes, the Controlled
Experiments would start.
The
routines were the same, but the experimental data was different.
Heating
the house for five minutes made the temperature rise to a very hot
one-hundred-and-twelve degrees, a forty degree change.
Cooling
started at one-hundred-and-three, and the temperature went down to
ninety-five
degrees. A change of eight degrees.
Jack's hand shot up. "Hey," he said to Sam, I thought
insulation was supposed to make the AC work better, but without it, the ice
brought the temperature down went down nine degrees, but with the insulation,
the temperature went down one degree less.
So the insulation doesn't seem to help the AC!"
The room grew quiet. The Lost
Legion was on the spot. A couple of
long moments passed. Then Sam tilted the
house back and removed the "AC" system.
"Look
at the ice cubes," he said, holding the bowl out for Jack to see.
"There's
no ice in there," said Jack.
"Feel
the water," said Sam.
"It's
not cold. It's almost warm," said Jack.
Everything
seemed to be hanging in the air by a thread.
What could this mean?
"Jack, the insulation kept the heat in the
house. The reason the air cooled down
was due to the AC system. The ice melted
and the water warmed up even though the air in the room started off hot. So compared to the AC in the uninsulated
house, the AC in the insulated house did a great job, okay?"
Jack thought about it, then smiled a great smile,
nodded at Sam, and began to clap. Then
he stood up. The whole class joined in
the joyous standing ovation. Sam's Lost
Legion stood together and started singing the refrain from a popular
song, "Halleluiah!" over
and over. The class joined in. The door
popped open. The principal, Ms. Bowden,
stuck her head in, then let Sam's mom squeeze by to get some video. It was the best "Final Friday" anyone
could remember. I saw the two ladies,
and Gale and Cashandra, and even Sam, brushing away tears. Halleluiah!
I hope this
story helped you understand what we want you to do for Activity 9!DrHanzonScience
©2010 James P. Louviere
Supplement 2
What is “Inventing” and How Do I Do It?
What Inventors
do:
Analyze,
Synthesize, Try it Out
Design, creativity in music, drawing, painting, dance, literature and the
sciences as well as sports and even systems architecture is nearly always a product of either
ANALYSIS or SYNTHESIS.
Analysis is really taking something apart to see what it is
made of. The little house is a simple cube
at the bottom and a half cube on top.
Other parts are the columns, which are cylinders, the dormer windows in
the attic, which are half cubes, and the chimney, a small half cube plus a
small cube.
To be creative, all you have to do is change the number
of parts or the size of the parts or the kinds of parts., but first you have to
“analyze” an object, substance or process to see what’s in it.
Synthesis is putting
things together. “Synthetic fuels” are
made from various products such as corn
or sugar cane, combined perhapswith some petroleum (fasoline).
When they vegetable ingredients are processed by a
chemist, they turn to vinegar or sugar or alcohol. If they are alcohol, they can be combined with gasoline or other
substances and used as fuel in a motor.
The fuel is “synthetic” because it is made from parts that are put together.
It
seems that most creative people have an active imagination and see what things
are in something – they can analyze something, or they can see how ingredients
in a substance or device can be put together in a new way to make something
new. They can “synthesize.”
A lot of this can happen when a person is not really
trying to be creative. The “subconscious
mind” is always computing, kind of in the background, like the processer in your computer. Sometimes it comes up with something “new”
even while you are sleeping, and you may wake up with a whole book in your
mind, or a new invention, or the
solution to a problem you had not been able to solve while you were awake. Some thinkers actually suggest that there is
some kind of “universal mind” we can tap into, but it’s not a
proven fact.
In
other cases, people have reported getting ideas from some kind of “super consciousness,” as if they were
sharing the thoughts of a person or persons they don’t even know. There seems to be something about the mental
states we go through while sleeping that tunes in somehow to ideas, even
complete songs or long stories that people have been able to record or write
down when they awake.
There’s
no scientific “proof” or explanation for this yet, but some famous book and
songs have emerged from dreams, according to those who “created” them. So far, no way of proving what happens in
these “inspirations” has been developed, but such reports are found frequently in history and legends. There is an old saying in the Book of
Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new
under the sun.” I’m sure you’ll find that in other traditions too. The only thing that is “new” and different is
that new parts may be found, like uranium or plutonium, so that new things can
be made. Or, new ways of combining old
materials can be discovered, When doctors
found the notes of a researcher who wrote a note about how his sandwich accidently
fell into a plate of bacteria in the lab while he was gone for some days, and
when he returned, the bread had gotten moldy and the bacteria next to it were
gone. The clumsy lab worker was Dr.
Fleming, and the people who read his notes tried making medicine out of moldy
bread and it did control the spread of bacteria. They spent years to make it a medicine called “penicillin,” but Dr. Fleming got the credit
for discovering it, and won the Nobel Prize.
The men who actually saw the importance of the moldy bread got little
notice and did not share in the Nobel Prize.
So maybe you will just accidently discover something, or create
something artistic or scientific, and it will benefit humanity forever.
