Measurement of Gravity

After realizing that college level physics students didn't know who Einstein was, I decided to try something a little different with my next science experiment. I invited all the students who had signed up on the interested in math and science sign up sheets to an exclusive measurement of gravity.

We dropped five little water balloons, five crumpled balls of paper and five gigantic water balloons off the third floor of the library while timing how long the balloons took to fall. Splat!

We then took the data inside and graphed the results in Excel. (This was the first time many had used a computer to do calculations.) I helped derive a relationship for gravity from the time it takes to fall. We talked about who was the most accurate timer, who was the most consistent.

After two and a half hours they were still asking questions like:
"Why does everything fall down towards the Earth?"
"Why doesn't the moon fall down too?"

We're winning.

Water Balloon in a Bottle?

The idea was to create a stand-alone science experiment that could generate sparks of interest with all ages. Carol asked me one day if I thought it was possible to get an egg into milk bottle. The seed was planted... What sprouted was a contest to challenge kids to get a water balloon into a kethcup bottle.

I stole an empty ketchup bottle from my baguette friends and bought some balloons. We created a sequence of laminated cards with questions in English and Laos to lead students to the answer without giving it away.

Surprising how many kids would try the "it doesn't fit, I must need to push harder" method. But water balloons add a sense of danger... At least tens times a day the sounds of water splashing and giggling could be heard. Ultimately it was a great science success for the library.

Try it at home. Can you get an egg sized water balloon into a ketchup bottle? Not as easy as it sounds... What's the science behind it? The staff at the library was able to brainstorm four answers. How many solutions can you find?

Paper Airplane Contest

We held the first-ever paper airplane contest in Luang Prabang! A poster was taped to the door and a 1 meter paper airplane was hung from the ceiling to advertise. About 20 kids showed up of which there was one girl, a couple of university students, and a handful of novice monks. Several kids had never made a paper airplane before!

The first paper airplane was named "Laos Airlines" and was a simple airplane with which some of the kids were familiar. The idea was to get over shyness and relax into a new learning environment. The first experiment was put a paper clip on the back or the front of the airplane and see what happens. The next experiment was to cut flaps into wings and tail of the plane and see what happens. Planes were flying every direction! I had typed up several airplane instruction sheets with names like Sua-Tiger to encourage different designs.

Next were the contests, the categories to be judged were: distance, speed, flight accuracy, landing accuracy, and the completely open-ended creativity category. The kids really got into building a plane to win the contests. There were prizes at stake! After the ensuing madness, a prize of two notebooks and two pens were awarded to each winner.

Getting kids past their shyness with foreigners and a new style of learning was easy. Language was the real barrier for me but I had my mad scientist assistant, Soulisuck, translate all the difficult concepts to Laos language. Getting kids to think on their own and be creative will be the ongoing challenge.

Carol, Alan, Linda, and Derin were the judges for the contests. Thanks for helping out, I hope you had as much fun as I did!