Boats and Turtles... Testing GitHub as Blogging Platform
Emma asked a great question this week, "Why do boats float?" I said "Great question!" Then I started to ramble about buoyancy and realized I had no coherent explanation myself. So I googled it, then she and I performed experiments. In a nutshell, the way I explained it to her is:
- Things put in water displace the water. (Good examples were of her in the bath tub.)
- For something to float, it must displace the same amount of water, in weight, as itself.
I attempted to demonstrate the buoyant force be putting a large measuring cup of water on our scale and showed that if I pushed a smaller bowl into the cup flat side down, it displaced more water and caused more buoyant force than if I put it in edge first, letting the water enter the bowl. This was reinforced by the numbers on the scale. I think this was largely lost on her. Then we took 2 pennies and weighed them - 1/8 oz. I asked her if we put them in the water, would they float. She said no. Then I let her test it out. They sank. I then tried to get her to figure out a way to make them float.. I rambled on about melting them down and making a shape that would displace more water that I don't think she got. Then we used some aluminum foil and played around with making boats to see which shapes, etc. would work and which didn't and talked about why. Its too early to tell, but maybe she got it. We also talked about the guy who figured out why boats float - Archimedes. What fun she had in mutilating his name. :)
Emma also offered to help me out at work. I asked her if she could program and she said no, so I offered to teach her. She had her first Logo lesson this weekend. Logo was the first language I was introduced to in Elementary school - on an Apple II. I only had a few lessons before they stopped for some reason, but I remember the excitement I had for programming even back then...
Here is a house we made:
She was mostly interested in seeing the pictures *I* could make rather making her own, but its a start. I introduced "functions" (making your own commands) and "variables" - there's a powerful concept to grok early on! She really enjoyed the "box" function I created along with the repeat command to iteratively draw the boxes. She insisted on printing those to take to class. :)
These pictures were made with ACSLogo for the Mac. Its a great free program. I have to admit, I was still playing with it well after Emma had run off to play with her friends.
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