Science Club: Electronics – Lighting Up! Part 2 was for those from Part 1 to come back and complete their circuits, as well as new attendees to try their hand at electronic circuits.

At the end of the first session, everyone had finished their lighting up kit and artwork – success!

The second and third sessions put together a new circuit. It was inspiring to see that those who had attended Part 1 knew exactly how to fit the components to the printed circuit board! It was also nice to see them lend a hand to those who had not attended before and were still finding their way with the electronics kits. Job done!

The set-up was the same as Part 1. The children learnt about the components that they were attaching to their printed circuit board and learning about how those components are soldered onto their boards. They learnt about how the circuit worked when they pressed the “on” button.

“You can earn your pocket money this week by mending our washing machine”

“Very neat soldering.”

Here are some of the finished electronics kits:

Please leave us a comment and let us know your best bit of Electronics Lighting Up! Part 2.
If you are working on an electronic kit at home, then send in a photo. We’d love to hear how Science Club has inspired you!

Until next time…

]]> http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?feed=rss2&p=615 0 http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?p=581 http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?p=581#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:14:00 +0000 andrew http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?p=581

Dunbar SciFest

Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th March 2013

ComputerXplorers delivered amazing Science Club workshops on this February weekend. Three sessions back-to-back for two different age ranges!

The theme of the workshops was ‘make your own computer game‘.

2DIY

The first two sessions for ages P1 5 – 8 yrs used a software application called 2Do It Yourself (2DIY) to make their own computer game. 2DIY from 2Simple provides the means for primary school pupils to create their own interactive games, puzzles, and quizzes.

The kids started by drawing their own Aliens and other characters that they could think of. Working in pairs, the group quickly made lots of sprites (a two-dimensional image) for their game.

Drawing their own characters involved lots of mouse skills and understanding how to choose shapes and colours from the drawing tools available with 2DIY.

Getting used to the mouse and 2DIY’s drawing tools.

Drawing their own characters

The finished product was a Space Invaders like game where you press the cursor keys to move your character and the aim is to capture the aliens and other objects that fly towards you! Great fun!

Space Invaders for a whole new generation.

This workshop exposed the group to many computer skills, such as mouse and keyboard skills, working with files on the computer, and editing images with software tools.

Scratch

The second session for ages 9 – 12 yrs used Scratch to make their computer game/animation.

Scratch, developed at the MIT Media Lab, is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art – and share your creations on the web. It is free to download from here and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix (including Raspberry Pi).

To control you sprite (the cat image seen below), you drag code fragments (called “blocks”) onto the scripts area to make programs. To keep the palette (the area of the left hand side containing the blocks) from being too big, it is organised into eight groups of blocks: movement, looks, sound, pen, control, sensing, operators, and variables. Different kinds of blocks have different colours and shapes.

Scratch initial screen

The kids very quickly got the idea and soon they were making their own amazing computer games and animations!

The finished games and animations can be played from ComputerXplorers’ website - click here to visit (be sure to select Dunbar Science Club from the playlist).

Controlling a ghost with the Scratch programming language.

It’s a dragon!

A Sherlock Holmes novel?

The second group focused on more complex computer skills, such as learning basic programming concepts (conditional if-then-else constructs and looping while constructs) and, of course, familiarising themselves with Scratch.

With special thank to Lynne Kerr and Jayne from ComputerXplorers for delivering a brilliant Science Club!

Please leave us comments below. We are always eager to hear what people thought of our Science Club workshops.

Science Club: Photography 2nd February 2013

]]> http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?feed=rss2&p=574 0 http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?p=519 http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?p=519#comments Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:37:45 +0000 andrew http://www.dunbarscienceclub.org.uk/?p=519 Special thanks to Bob Kibble for running yet another fantastic Dunbar Science Club!

We are also grateful to Young Engineers and Science Clubs Scotland for the free lighting up circuits.

We started off the Science Club sessions by handing out a little bag full of electronic components, like resistors (to restrict the flow of electric current), a capacitor (used to store energy), a light-emitting diode (LED), a microchip (to control our circuit), and some batteries. The children spent the next hour assembling their electronic circuits. The assembled circuit that flashed a light was used as part of an art creation.

The electronic circuit

Although assembling some parts of the electronic kit proved fiddly, there were plenty of Adult Helpers™ available.

Adult Helpers

Final touches to our circuit

Soldering

This Electronics Science Club did not mess around with electronic kits that you clip together! We kept it old school! The circuits had to be soldered!

Bob Kibble and Audrey Cameron did a fine job soldering all the childrens’ circuits. Even yours truly soldered a few!

While the Adult Helpers™ soldered, they explained to the children what they were doing and why they were melting solder on to the printed circuit board (PCB).

One that I made earlier

Lights for a Dalek

If putting together an electric circuit, soldering it to allow the electricity to travel through it, and watching an LED flash was not exciting enough, the children designed and created their own mount for their flashing circuit board!

Flashing lights

Ninja!

It came from Mars!

Sadly the first session ran out of time and they were not able to see their final product. Fear not! There will be a Science Club: Electronics – Lighting Up! Part 2 in which the first session will be able to finish their designs. More details later.

Please let us know what you thought of this Science Club session and all our other sessions by leaving a comment.

See you next time!

For this workshop we welcomed Andrew Collins, a Civil Engineer with his wonderful bridge building props and amazing, enormous suspension bridge model.

We started out talking about the different stresses bridges are required to withstand, and the materials we can use to build them, and the ways in which they are put together to do this. He showed us models of several types of bridges, and explained how they worked, using photos taken of local bridges to illustrate. The slides he used are available at the end of the blog to save to your own computer.

Wooden blocks good in compression but not tension.

A square lattice- requires bracing by a crosspiece to make a stronger triangle shape.

Constructing an arch from shaped blocks on a support.

The free standing arch.

After this it was time to head next door and start building our very own model suspension bridge, based on the Forth Road Bridge. First we measured out the distance apart for the abutments, then placed the piers, and strung the rope cables across them. Next we laid out the road deck panels, and attached them to the suspension cable with string and bulldog clips. Finally we clipped the deck panels together, and adjusted the strings so that the road lay flat. For all those intrepid modellers out there, instructions and diagrams to build your own version are on the slides at the end of this blog!

Abutments and piers laid out across the “water”.

Attaching the hangers to the cables.

Attaching the hangers and deck panels.

Adjusting the hangers. Almost ready!

The finished bridge!

Lastly, we all took turns to drive a radio-controlled car along the bridge. Everyone had lots of fun trying to keep their vehicle straight (I think most people went off between the cables at some point; just as well they have crash barriers on the real one!), and headed off home to build more bridges from Lego or Meccano. If anyone has pictures of their home-built bridges, please send them to us and we’ll post them here.

We also had visitors from the Dunbar Rotary Club, who have very kindly presented the Science Club with a cheque to support attendance of the Science Club by disadvantaged children. Very many thanks to the Rotary Club for this.

Dunbar Rotary Club’s kind donation to the Science Club.

We all had lots of fun whilst learning about bridges, and a big thank you to Andrew Collins for hosting this workshop! Please do download the PDFs of the slide handouts, and keep your eyes peeled for our local bridges:

DBS Bridge building page 1
DBS Bridge building page 2
DBS Bridge building page 3
DBS Bridge building page 4
DBS Bridge building page 5
DBS Bridge building page 6
DBS Bridge building page 7
DBS Bridge building page 8
DBS Bridge building page 9

We began with a short talk about what we would be likely to see in different directions when we went outside, with the help of a match-the-word game and a couple of posters to show the easiest-to-spot constellations and objects. Then it was on with the hats, coats, scarves, gloves and hi-vis jackets and out onto the rugby pitch to see what we could see. As our eyes acclimatised and the sky darkened, more and more stars were visible. Bob showed us how to block out the streetlamps with our arms and hands to see better, and stressed the importance of being well-wrapped up against the cold (this became very obvious to some a few minutes into the evening!)

Bob pointing out Polaris

Playing the matching game to think of things we might see

We started with the beloved Plough, and used it to find Polaris, the North Star. The moon was also a bright crescent, and the dark of the moon was visible by “earthshine”. Then we moved on to Cassiopeia, and looked overhead to see the Summer Triangle of Vega (in the Lyre), Deneb (part of Cygnus, the Swan) and Altair (part of Aquila, the Eagle).  Next, we turned to try and find Jupiter (not seen by the first group, but brightly visible for the second), Castor and Pollux (Gemini, the Twins), Pegasus, with it’s easy-to-spot square of stars, a very bright star Aldebaran (in Taurus, the Bull), the Pleiades (Seven Sisters) group, and tried to see Orion- still very low on the horizon and obscured by the town and lights.

Then we returned to the warmth of Hallhill for more activities and discussion. Bob had prepared sheets to fill in with what we saw, and also some copies of his diagrams to take home and use on other nights. We talked about the relative brightness of stars and other objects, and also about the distances between stars, and how these build up the picture of the sky that we see. We also talked about how the stars seem to move across the sky (remember it’s us that’s moving), and how early astronomers worked this out.

Two “stars” of differing size and brightness

The smaller but brighter “star” looks similar to the more distant, duller “star”

Bob’s Star Chart

The second group was on fire with their questions and we covered how black holes form, how stars are born, the different colours of the stars and what will happen to our Sun in the future. Bob and the children enjoyed themselves immensely with this debate, and everyone went home planning to get back outside for another look. Thanks again Bob!

Our family was inspired by this session, and have been back out on subsequent nights with the binoculars, looking at moon craters and trying to see the four large moons of Jupiter (no luck; think we need stronger binoculars… or maybe a telescope!) We are definitely putting the Philips Stargazing 2013 guide on our Christmas list!

We also found a few websites that let you know what to look for in the night sky each week or month:

Brilliant monthly and daily guides to what to look for:

http://www.astronomy.co.uk/skytonight

Sky Hopping Tutorial to find your way around the sky:

http://www.astrocentral.co.uk/starting.html

Sir Patrick Moore’s Sky at Night Programme and information page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mk7h

The BBC’s Stargazing Live Programmes and information cards to print:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b019h4g8/features/events

There is also a monthly magazine, BBC The Sky at Night, which has the month’s star chart in the middle, along with lots of other information.

Many many thanks to Fiona McGibbon of the ESEU, and husband David, who hauled rock samples, information sheets and a microscope out to school for our budding geologists to have a look at.

We started with an introductory talk about igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks, how they come to have their various characteristics, and how geologists study them. After this, everyone looked at their group of four rocks with a magnifying glass to see if they could categorise them correctly.

Then the group halved to look in more detail at some examples of each type of rock; we learned lots of interesting facts and saw volcanic lava in different forms, rock studded with beautiful crystals and some of the oldest rocks in the world. Much discussion of volcanoes, rock dating techniques and what the earth would have been like a billion years ago ensued. Everyone was amazed to learn that Arran had once been to a desert…

Looking at the rocks

Magnificent rocks!

Puddingstone

Obsidian

Schist

The other half looked at some very thin slices of rock with the microscope – these were fascinating and very beautiful. Then the groups changed over to allow everyone to see the rocks or microscope slices.

Down the microscope

Granodiorite micrograph (NB this is not the actual micrograph we looked at)

Look out for more at SciFest next March!

There was plenty of excited crowding round and the enthusiasm and fascination of the children was evident. Here are a few of the favourite moments:

Using a Bunsen burner to demonstrate the colours of flames that different elements burn with

Fun with static electricity

The perennial favourite, the Van de Graaff generator

Peering down the microscope at the enticing world of the unseen

Many thanks to Dunbar Grammar School, and to Mrs Gibson and Mrs McDougall-Welch for their time and skills.