S1 Taste test
S2 Smell tell
Hold your nose and
put an orange slice in
your mouth.
Chew it a moment.
Can you taste
anything?
Let go of your nose
and take a breath.
Can you taste anything
now?
Which scent is which?
Rose
Lavender
Tea tree
Orange
Lemon
Mint
Chocolate
S3 Tornado in
a bottle
Tornado - explanation
Turn the bottles over
so the top bottle holds
the liquid.
It does not flow
through easily.
Now give it a swirl.
You can see a vortex,
and the fluid flows to
the lower bottle easily.
Swirling the water in the bottle
while pouring it out makes a vortex
that looks a bit like a tornado
This vortex makes it easier for air to
come into the bottle and allows the
water to pour out faster.
If you look carefully, you will be
able to see the hole in the middle
of the vortex that allows the air to
come up inside the bottle.
If you do not swirl the water but
just allow it to flow out on its own,
then the air and water have to take
turns passing through the mouth of
the bottle (thus the glug-glug
sound).
S4 Sparks in
your mouth
In a really dark room,
wait a few minutes until
your eyes get
accustomed to the
darkness.
Put the mint in your
mouth.
Break it up with your
teeth – you should see
bluish flashes of light in
the mirror.
Triboluminescence
When you crush the sweet, you are
forcing electrons out of their atomic
fields in the sugar molecules.
The free electrons bump into nitrogen
molecules in the air, passing energy to
them and making them vibrate.
The nitrogen molecules emit light
(mostly UV but some visible) to get rid
of the excess energy.
This happens for all hard sweets, but
this particular type of sweet has
methyl salicylate in it.
This is fluorescent – it absorbs short
wavelength light and emits longer
wavelength, so the short UV light is
absorbed and re-emitted as visible,
blue, light.
S5 Lightning
on a plate
Rub the wool cloth on
the Styrofoam for two
minutes, rub hard and
fast.
Pick up the aluminium
case using the pencil
handle and put it on
the Styrofoam and you
should see
the small spark.
Explanation
When you rub the wool on the Styrofoam,
an electric charge is built up (static
electricity).
Touching the charged styrofoam to the
metal case allows the built up charge to
discharge; electrons jump from the
styrofoam to the metal.
Lightning is an electrical discharge within a
thunderstorm. Inside the thundercloud are
hailstones. They bang together and charge
is built up on their surfaces. Typically
negative charges build up on descending
hailstones and positive ones on ascending
hailstones. As the cloud grows, the top
becomes positively charged and the
bottom negatively charged. Eventually the
charge has built up so much that it must
discharge – lightning!
Lightning can spark within a cloud, from
one cloud to another, from a cloud to the
ground, or from the ground to a cloud.
S9 Pepper’s Ghost
A viewer looking through the red
rectangle sees a ghost floating
next to the table. The illusion is
produced by a large piece of glass,
Plexiglas or plastic film situated at
a 45 degreen angle between
viewer and scene (green outline).
The glass reflects the contents of
a room hidden from the viewer
(left).
If the mirror-image room (left) is
darkened, it does not reflect well in the
glass. The empty room (top) is brightly
lit, making it very visible to the viewer.
When the lights in the mirror-image
room are raised (with the empty room
being dimmed slightly to compensate),
the ghost appears out of nowhere.
E1 Geomag
T1 Beebot challenge
What can you build
using magnets?
Make sure your
structure is sound by
matching the magnetic
polarities carefully.
Get the robot through
the maze.
Press clear to clear the
robot’s memory.
Press the buttons in the
right sequence, and
then press “Go.”
S6 cannon shot!
When the elastic launcher is
pulled back, the volume air
inside the container increases.
When the launcher is released,
the volume of the air rapidly
decreases. The air slows down in
the centre of the Airzooka, and
speeds up along the edges where
it hits the telescoped angles of
the plastic shell, thus creating a
toroidal or donut-shaped air
vortex.
Use the AirZooka to shoot The air vortex travels some
down the paper cups. distance and retains its energy
sufficiently to cause a
disturbance when it strikes a
person or object.
When the tube is open, the air
vibrates with a wave form like:
There is a point in the middle
where the air doesn’t move. The
air effectively vibrates only for
half the length of the tube.
The longer the tube, the longer
the wave length, the lower the
frequency, the lower the pitch.
When the tube is closed, the air
vibrates with a wave form like:
The wavelength is doubled and
the note is lower.
S7
Boomwhackers
Lightly tap the
boomwhackers to
make a sound.
Which gives a higher
pitch – longer or
shorter ones?
What happens when
you put an end cap
on?
M1 Head over tails
E2 Domino Rally
•Put four coins on a
table, in a row, all tails
up.
•You must turn three
different coins over to
complete one move!
•How many moves will it
take to get all the coins
on heads?
Go on, set one up!
M3 Letters in one cut
See video.
What letters can you
do in one cut?
Can you write your
name, or GUIDES?
Marshmallows have small
S11 Marshmallow
bubbles of air trapped inside
them. These bubbles are at
Squash
and
Squeeze
atmospheric pressure.
When syringe plunger is pulled, Put the marshmallow in
the air inside has more room to
the syringe
take up, so the pressure reduces.
The air bubbles inside the
marshmallows are therefore at a Making sure the syringe
higher pressure than the air nozzle is not covered, put
surrounding the marshmallows,
so those bubbles push outwards, the plunger in half way
causing the marshmallows to
Stop up the nozzle with
expand.
When the syringe plunger is
some blutak
pushed in, there is less space for
Now pull the plunger
the air in the syringe so the
pressure increases again, and the further out, or push it in
marshmallows deflate back to
their normal size and further. and see the marshmallow
grow or shrink.
M4 Möbius strip
Cut a strip of paper and mark it like this:
A
C
B
D
Now add in one twist, so you can see A and B but not C and
D. Bend the paper around so that you have a single loop,
with A matching to D and B to C. Stick them together.
•What happens if you put draw a line in the middle all the
way along the strip of paper?
•What happens if you cut along that line?
•What if the line you drew was only a third of the way across
the strip?
S8 Chromatography
•Cut a strip into the paper
• Pop some coloured dots
on the paper
•Fold the strip down and
dangle into water.
•Go and do something else
and come back to have a
look later
The water has travelled up
the strip of paper and spread
onto the rest of the paper.
Some inks are soluble in
water, some aren’t.
The ones that are will
dissolve in the water and
travel along the paper with
the water.
To get a range of coloured
pens, a mix of base inks are
used. These have slightly
different properties and will
effectively travel different
distances with the water. As
a result, we can separate out
the base inks used to make
the pen ink.
Name _________________________________
Activities done:
S1
Taste test
M1
Head over tails
S2
Smell tell
M2
Flexagons
S3
Tornado
M3
Letters in one cut
S4
Sparks in your mouth
M4
Mobius Strip
S5
Lightning on a plate
E1
Geomag
S6
Cannon shot
E2
Domino Rally
S7
Boomwhackers
T1
Beebot Challenge
S8
Chromatography
S9
Pepper’s Ghost
E3
Marble Run
S10
Wind Bags
T2
Martian Relay 20 Oct
S11
Marshmallow Squeeze
T3
Wigglebots
S12
Newton’s Cradle
24 Nov
20 Oct
S10 Windbags
•How many puffs will it
take to blow up this
bag?
Just one.
Hold the bag as open as
possible around 20 cm
away from your mouth
and gently blow in.
The long bag quickly
inflates because air from
the atmosphere is drawn
into the bag along with
the stream of air from
your lungs.
M2 Flexagons
•Use the templates to
make your own
flexagon.
•Make sure your cuts
are careful or they don’t
work well.
S12 Newton’s Cradle
Try not to tangle it please!
The toy illustrates the three
main physics principles at
work: conservation of
energy, conservation of
momentum and friction.
Energy: One falling ball imparts
enough energy to move one other ball
the same distance it fell at the same
velocity it fell. Similarly, two balls
impart enough energy to move two
balls, and so on.
Momentum: The balls continue in the
same direction, in the absence of
another force (the last ball falls back
due to gravity.)
Friction: Eventually the balls stop due
to losses due to friction.
Name _________________________________
Activities done:
S1
Taste test
M1
Head over tails
S2
Smell tell
M2
Flexagons
S3
Tornado
M3
Letters in one cut
S4
Sparks in your mouth
M4
Mobius Strip
S5
Lightning on a plate
E1
Geomag
S6
Cannon shot
E2
Domino Rally
S7
Boomwhackers
T1
Beebot Challenge
S8
Chromatography
S9
Pepper’s Ghost
E3
Marble Run
S10
Wind Bags
T2
Martian Relay 20 Oct
S11
Marshmallow Squeeze
T3
Wigglebots
S12
Newton’s Cradle
D1
Cloud in a Bottle Demo
24 Nov
20 Oct
Name _________________________________
Activities done:
S1
Taste test
M1
Head over tails
S2
Smell tell
M2
Flexagons
S3
Tornado
M3
Letters in one cut
S4
Sparks in your mouth
M4
Mobius Strip
S5
Lightning on a plate
E1
Geomag
S6
Cannon shot
E2
Domino Rally
S7
Boomwhackers
T1
Beebot Challenge
S8
Chromatography
S9
Pepper’s Ghost
E3
Marble Run
S10
Wind Bags
T2
Martian Relay 20 Oct
S11
Marshmallow Squeeze
T3
Wigglebots
S12
Newton’s Cradle
D1
Cloud in a Bottle Demo
24 Nov
20 Oct