Cucumber Wave
Hubby and I take turns watching 'The Kids Should See This' and I'm not sure who gets more excited to share the short films! He found this physics one http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/how-to-build-your-own-wave-machine-physics-demo and let me have a look.
The next day I set to work recreating the experiment.
I love that the equipment is easily available and inexpensive. Our Wave Machine was not quite as long as Alom's original, but still had the same great effect. We re-inforced duct tape on both sides, to make it a re-useable tool.
The accuracy of kabob spacing was not as crucial as the weight balancing, so we spaced the kabob skewers by sight.
Then I got busy cutting chunks of cucumber, while O & Baby C thread them to each end of the skewers.
We made sure to pierce them through the skin, so they would not slide off.
Then we taped the machine to two chairs. It was heavier than expected with all those cucumber slices, so O & Baby C had to stay seated to weight down the mechanism!
We also had to adjust some of the cucumber slices, as they were not all of equal weight, so as Alom suggested, we simply moved them down their skewer until the machine was balanced.
The Wave!
Although many times when it reached Baby C, she would stop it from returning!
Until she got herself busy eating cucumbers off the skewers!
NOTE TO SELF: Prepare back-up cucumbers when working with toddler scientists, who are constantly conducting their own experiments!
Refrigerated Science!
We folded and placed the Wave Machine in the fridge for Daddy to try out later in the day.
This helped prevent the cucumbers from drying out and falling off the skewers.
Daddy often has to ask before eating/drinking something stored here, since half of the fridge contents tend to be a science experiment!
EXPAND ON SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS
Alom Shaha. I love the no-nonsense, interest driven experiment, so looked up Mr. Shaha on You Tube. Not surprisingly, he is connected to Ri (ExperiMental) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_6x7OS_Nlg
..and catch him at whyscience.co.uk http://whyscience.co.uk/contributors/alom-shaha/index.php
http://whyscience.co.uk/the-film/index.php