Mr. Richards' Blog

Kyle Litwack's physical science project: engineering a popsicle stick bridge. He tested two different models, a single truss (strong) and a more flexible, suspension model (for looks). The results he filmed below. Thanks for sharing the video, Kyle.

Hopefully I'll have some more of our "Got Science?" event to share, but in the meantime, here is a video of our liquid nitrogen explosion finale (thanks Sarah Richards for filming, Diana Ervin for picking up the LN2, and Kyle, Leeanna, Trinity, Riley, Gabriel, and Cody for helping out with the event!)

In preparation for our "Got Science?" science demonstration this Thursday, we spent part of last week experimenting with liquid nitrogen. One of the most impressive experiments is to confine liquid nitrogen in a bottle. Because liquid N2 boils at -321 F, it generates a massive amount of steam (and pressure). Eventually, the bottle bursts in a powerful explosion. When confined and arranged under 1000 ping pong balls, the result is pretty neat! We also succeeded in creating water bottle rockets, deflating balloons in liquid nitrogen and getting liquid air, and other interesting projects. Thanks to Kyle Litwack for this video.

What's in a bond? If starch were not covalently bonded, would it still smell as sweet? OK, probably not, considering it burns. And yes, probably about 98% of people did not catch my hopeless Shakespeare pun. In this lab last week, our chemistry class investigated bonding, the force holding atoms together. As it turns out, we can determine covalently bonded (sharing of electrons) structures from ionically bonded (electro-magnetically attracted) structures by their melting points and conductivity in water! Armed with our homemade bunsen burner (courtesy of Mr. Monroe - thanks!) and a multimeter, we put three compounds to the test. The ionic compound (NaCl) conducted electricity in water and only melted at a high temperature. The covalent compounds did not conduct electricity and melted much sooner.  Starch doing a little bit of melting and burning at the same time The conductivity test: measuring the resistance to current flow and comparing with H2O

See a few pictures of some Physical Science projects below. Thanks Brooke for the excellent photos! Kamryn and Geneva hooking up some limes. Who would think that these things generate electricity?!? Kyle putting textbooks to good use (as weights to hold down his popsicle stick bridge supports). Yes, we do also read them. Jordan investigates differences in animal skulls (did you know there are some major structural differences between a fox and a wolf?)

For our unit on ecosystems, we are studying biodiversity. Our question last week was: are trees an indicator for overall ecosystem biodiversity? To find out, we looked at the biodiversity of various forests and how they match with overall ecosystem biodiversity. For example: Borneo, one of the most biodiverse places on Planet Earth, hosts 700 individual species of tree  in its forests! (Mind you, that's trees alone, not including all other types of plants.) To see how we compare, we ventured into the Deep Dark Forests of Tok to collect as many different species of tree as we could find. Well... It wasn't very hard. Four to five species later, we were back in the lab noting differences between white spruce, aspen, birch, and possibly two types of willow. That's right... About four total species. So why - what factors affect biodiversity? (Hint: sunlight and water sure do help!) See the pictures below from Kaitlyn, our class photographer last week. Will and Jazlyn m

In our Chemistry, Physical Science, and 7th Grade Science classes, we are working heavily on science projects. The students have designed their own projects and experiments and will be collecting their own data. In Physical Science, we have experiments ranging from lemon batteries, Alkaseltzer lava lamps, animal skull identification, music tastes and their relation to age and gender, popsicle stick engineering, ideal tastes of soda, angles to shoot a basketball from various spots on the court, and dissipation of energy from a bouncing basketball. In Chemistry, the students are working on factors affecting rabbits' ability to navigate a maze, chemical extraction of potato starch, lipstick and makeup chemicals, ideal saturation of salt in icewater to lower the temperature, ink chemicals, creating fuse lines, and other projects. Our 7th grade projects range from designing an aquarium and testing different aspects of fish habitat, building an indoor tornado out of dry ice, and ma

Our elective period has ended and we are back to our core class schedule. A few highlights from our elective classes: Martial Arts We've been going strong in our fourth week of martial arts. Thus far, students have been practicing the forms of punching, several types of kicks, aikido, and jiujitsu. We've emphasized jiujitsu the past two weeks and have done a lot of rolling around on the mat. I'm also keeping a Wednesday evening practice that is open to the students or community who want to attend (from 4:00PM -5:00PM). I planned on having some pictures to provide, but will have to wait till our next session. Outdoor Leadership This last week we've focused on navigation, winter clothing, shelter building, animal sign, and starting fires in winter. Despite some troubles with students dressing for the weather, we did spend a lot of time outside. We built two survival shelters out in the woods, which the two groups took in different ways: the Taj Mahal, with s