• Question: what experiment can we do at school which is really cool

    Asked by masterjarjaraj to James, Anna, Joe, Leonie, Olivia on 13 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by Dan the man.
    • Photo: Joe Spencer

      Joe Spencer answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      hmm there’s loads.
      Some Alkali metals in water is always fun, like Sodium (they fizz and explode)
      OR get a van der graaf generator to demonstrate electron transfer and make your hair stand on end.
      If you get a plasma ball from a shop and a fluorescent light you can make the light work without plugging it in !!!

    • Photo: Olivia Lynes

      Olivia Lynes answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      You could make alcohol solutions of the transition metals and see what colours they change into when you spray (GENTLY!) the solutions into a bunsen flame.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      Hi Masterjarjarj

      You can go a great experiment on sea level rise using

      1 big bowl
      1 smaller bowl with a flat base
      Water
      Ice cubs
      A hairdryer/blowtorch/bunsen burner
      1 responsible adult

      Place the smaller bowl upside down in the big bowl, surround the big bowl with water. Place some ice cubes in the water and mark on the sea level on the little bowl.

      Apply your heat and melt your ice cubes, see what if any chance you get in sea level.

      Now place the remaining ice cubs on the land, apply you heat again and see what happens to your sea level.

      The ice cubes in water represent sea ice and ice shelves and the ice cubs on the bowl represent the ice sheets.

      Obviously, electricty and water are a potentially very dangerous combination, so please use the responsible adult to apply the heat.

      Sorry, I couldn’t really answer this in the Live Chat, but hope you like the suggests everyone makes in this question!

    • Photo: Anna Ashton

      Anna Ashton answered on 15 Mar 2015:

      You can test your classmates’ reflexes are working properly with this funny experiment.

      All you have to do is get your classmate to sit on a chair with their legs crossed so the one on top can swing freely. Then tap their leg just below the knee with the side of your hand. The leg should kick out quickly by itself if you’ve found the right place (you might have to give it a few gos to get the right place). Then get your classmate to do it to you, it feels really funny!

      The leg kick happens because of a reflex, called the knee jerk reflex. A reflex is a very fast (it should only take 50 milliseconds, that’s 0.05 seconds!) automatic response that happens without any control from the brain, so that you have no way to stop it happening. Instead it’s controlled by the spinal cord and so can be used by doctors to check the spinal cord’s working properly.

    • Photo: Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes

      Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes answered on 15 Mar 2015:

      You could find out the relation between different factors and your movement precision!

      All you need is some pieces of paper, a ruler and a pen.

      The factors you could test are:
      – sight (eyes open versus eyes closed)
      – hand (left hand versus right hand)
      – speed (slow versus quick)
      – anything else that you think that might be related to your movement precision

      How to do the experiment:
      1. Prepare your pieces of paper by putting two small dots on them, 25 cm apart
      2. Ask you ‘participant’ (class mate) to hold the pen on one of the dots (the start) and move as accurately as possible to the other dot (the target). Dependent on which factor you’re investigating, you also instruct your participant to keep his/her eyes open or closed during the movement (or move with the right/left hand; move fast/slow, etc).
      3. Repeat step 2 ten times for each ‘condition’ (the variant of the factor you are testing. For example if you’re doing the speed version, do 10 repetitions for fast and 10 for slow). Take a new piece of paper for every new condition and new participant
      4. By comparing how close the movements ended to the target you can see if the factor is related to movement precision

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