Science Club

Over the next week or two we will be finishing up the trebuchets. The hard core group made some extra parts to help along some of the people who have gotten stalled.

EB Students putting together dome/hoophouse

heat is light

What is a compost furnace?

It is a way to use the heat from compost to heat our greenhouse.  Most backyard compost piles are examples of cold composting. If the water, carbon nitrogen and oxygen are in the right balance a whole series of bacteria and microorganisms will grow and produce heat. Our test furnace is small so we will need to insulate it inorder for the heat to accumulate.

Click here to see the slideshow.

Finishing somethings. Starting others

Chris's homeroom and B's homeroom finished up their healthy place-mats today. Earlier we had looked at different ways that different cultures teach healthy eating habits.  For insistence in an India educational video there was an emphasis on water that is missing in the US. In Japan we saw a recommendation to have foods of different colors. If you are talking about whole foods the requires fruits, vegetables, carbohydrates etc. 

In a somewhat simplified way we also talked about benefits that we get from different foods, proteins to buid and repair our bodies, carbohydrates to provide energy etc.

We had talked about ways to represent portions and the different ways that this can be represented, pyramid, plate, cloud, even a map of the solar system. The students also included activities like exercise, sleep etc. in their own way.

Elaine and Susan's classes are also finishing up.  Val's class may need another week.

Cheese fail

We tried to make string cheese, which is basically mozzerella that has been pulled like taffy.

Ours was too crumbly.

I did some research. We may need to add a little CaCl2. Anyone work in a biochemical lab? I need a little Calcium Chloride.

Trebuchet Progress Report

We continue to build during science club on Monday, Wednesday and Friday during lunch. Anyone is welcome and several students have joined recently. They are all at different places in the process so there are a lot of opportunities to help each other.

Several SK families went to the Lake Orion pumpkin launch and brought back many ideas. One parent commented that there were not a lot of entries and some looked to have been built very last minute. He concluded the event was ripe for our domination next year!