Middle School Science Innovative Uses

By Dave Vernier I recently started using an electric pot for heating tea water. Early on, I sometimes assumed that the water was hot enough when I heard the loud “boiling” sounds. Yet, when I poured the water to make tea, it was not very hot. Our boiling water apparatus We decided to make a…

Subjects: Middle School Science

Vernier recently attended the GLOBE annual conference in San Antonio, TX, where we sponsored a field trip to Natural Bridge Caverns, a limestone cave. Sixty teachers made their way through the wet, drippy tour of the caverns and collected relative humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure data along the way. Due to the recent, heavy rains…

Subjects: Middle School Science

Parker Moreland has been volunteering at an intermediate school in New Milford, CT, where he has come up with a clever modification of the “What Causes the Seasons” lab in our Earth Science with Computers book. First, instead of taping a temperature sensor to a globe, he opened a cardboard globe and mounted a Surface…

Subjects: Middle School Science

Introduction Different types of hot dogs will cool at different rates after they have been cooked. This activity takes the first steps in investigating this phenomenon by measuring the rate that a warmed hot dog cools. Students can compare the ingredients of various types of hot dogs (all-beef, veggie, turkey, etc.) to help explain the…

Subjects: Middle School Science

Tom Bird (Austin Community College) uses our Gas Pressure Sensor to study the launches of Stomp Rockets. This is a light-weight, inexpensive toy rocket, powered by air that is compressed by stomping on a plastic air chamber. He drilled and tapped a threaded hole and installed a pressure tap, which he connected to a Biology…

Subjects: Middle School Science