Heat transfer activity.

This week I had my daughter help me with the experiment. She helped me choose what materials to use. We chose foil, cotton cloth, plastic wrap and a coffee filter. After 30 minutes the water in the cup with the foil over it was a little warmer than the rest but only by 1 degree. There wasn't a stand out of the materials. There was just a few degrees difference between all the materials. I was expect ing there to be more.

I could see where this would help students in their study of heat transfer, conduction and convection but it would not be a very exciting demonstration. So if I could relate it to food that they eat the they would be more involved and could learn through a hands on activity.  I could divide the class into groups. Each group would be given a food to work with. For example: pizza, biscuit, baked potato and a hamburger. They would have to design a container that would help keep the food hot. We could test these out. I picked all of these foods because I would have access to them from the cafeteria.

Focusing on the E in Stem

The question this week that I explored was how do different surfaces affect the momentum of marbles. I decided that I would get some input from my ELT group. We talked about the marbles, the force it would take to put the marbles into motion and how the momentum could be changed or affected. We looked at the different surfaces that were in our room that we could use. We decided to use the desktop, the part of the board that holds the markers and the concrete outside of my room.
I had the students predict what would happen on each surface with the momentum of the marble. They wrote this is their science notebook. As we conducted the experiment we found that the marbles rolled great on the smooth desktop. They did not fair as well on the bumpy concrete pad. We talked about our findings and how they compared to their predictions.
The next time that I conducted the experiment with a whole class I would have a few surfaces set up for the experiment and then have the students to brainstorm ways that the experiment could be improved and another surface that they could explore.
The goal that I would have for my students would be for them to see how different surfaces could affect the momentum of objects and the amount of force exhibited on an object would also affect the momentum.