I Built This!

Last week, I finished my three weeks at the Exploratorium's Teacher Institute. And now I have all these toys that I made to play with, that I thought I might show off! If you want more detailed explanations or plans for how any of this works or how to build your own, let me know!

Project #1: The Visual Vocalizer 

Basically, you place a laser pointer (which I didn't have the day I took this picture) in the open tube at the top. It shines down on the little mirror. You speak into the canister at the bottom, which causes the membrane stretched over the tube to vibrate. This is turn causes the laser beam to vibrate, which projects various shapes onto the wall. It works best if you are loud and use a low pitch. Looks something like this on the wall: 

This project was surprisingly easy! And the most importantly, I learned to cut and connect PVC pipe, which means I can now make just about anything!! Well... almost!

I think it will serve as mostly a prop in my classroom - something for me to show that sound causes vibration, and then after that they can just play with it!

Project #2: The Fan Cart
So, you're on a quest to save world! And you have to cross this really big lake. Like so big, you can't swim across it! But you come across this rickety raft. It even has a sail! And you just happened to stumble upon this giant leaf thing. And you figure you can drive the raft by fanning wind into its sails! That makes so much sense right?! Link sure seems to think so!

Turns out, we can test this idea!!

Here's a little cart. It has a sail and a little battery powered fan. And you can turn the fan on and watch the cart go no where really fast! (video below).

However, we made both the sail and the fan removeable. If you take the sail off it'll work! So Link really should just find a raft without a sail, and he'd be much better off with his giant leaf.

Or you can remove the fan (so that it's not part of the cart system) and leave the sail attached and that will work too! So if it's windy, the sail might be useful.

The video is not of best quality - I was being lazy, but you get the idea! 

This project looked deceptively simple. But it had so many tiny pieces! Had to learn to use a band saw and a drill press. As well as how to hold a non symmetrical fan blade completely still to widen it's pivot hole to fit our tiny motors. It was even difficult to figure out how to get the faucet washers inside the CD!

Project #3: The micrometer!
This one may not look like much, and it's pretty annoying to calibrate (but pretty easy to just take the initial error into account), but it can measure the thickness of a piece of paper or a single hair! Each number on the dial is 10 micrometers (10^-5 meters). It's constructed entirely of common household objects. The hardest part was getting the zip ties tight enough.

Project #4: Poor Man's Turn Table
You only need a sharp pencil, a pin, a piece of paper, and some tape. Of course you have to be pretty good about turning it manually at thirty revolutions per minute (or whatever your record calls for), but hey, you can hear the music! Practice a lot and it might even sound the way it's supposed to!

Project #5: Simple Electric Motor
I actually already knew how to make these, but this was a lesson in how to make it cheap. This involves using a paper cup, two magnets (one on the inside of the cup - not shown), a coil of copper wire, two paper clips, tape, and aluminum foil (for the school that cannot afford alligator wires). Look at it go!

Project #6: Stop Motion Videos! 
So, this didn't exactly involve building anything, but we definitely created some content! It's a cute way to animate something that is difficult to visualize. Goodness knows, I can never find the exact video that I want to show something. But depending on what you're doing, it can take about an hour to make a ten second video, so it's not practical to use consistently in my presentation to students.

First video - no editing really. Just took a bunch of pictures and strung them together. 

Final Project: with just a little sound editing, it becomes disgustingly cute! 

Instead of using this to illustrate concepts, it was suggested that we use this as an assessment tool. Have students create a project that shows whether or not they understand a concept. We were asked to create a video that showed something moving at a constant speed, then accelerating, and then decelerating. The whole video is 4 seconds long! Super easy to assess. And you know students would get into it!!

You could have students illustrate or animate various processes or cycles or whatever! Meiosis comes to mind for some reason.

Anyway, it's nice to have some time off now. Of course, now I'm mostly just working on curriculum writing homework for an online course I'm taking, so it still doesn't feel like a vacation yet. But hey, at least I get to stay up and sleep in as long as I want.