OUR NEXT MEETING...
                             ...will be April 04, 2000
                                        4:15 p.m.

          Section A (K-5) meets in 111 LS
          Section B (4-8) meets in 152 LS

          Be sure to sign up for a presentation if you haven't
          already done so!

                  SECTION   PRESENTATIONS        REFRESHMENTS

          Apr  4    A       Christine Scott      Ben Butler Jr
                            Lilla Green          Kenneth Onumah
                            Shirley Cesair       Carolyn McGee
                            Carolyn McGee        Iona Greenfield
                            Ben Butler Jr

                    B       Janet Sheard         Janet Sheard
                            Earnie Garrison      Charlene K. Smith
                            ________________     _________________
                            _??? OTHERS ???_     _________________


                               SEE YOU THERE!!

          AT OUR LAST MEETINGS (March 21)...

• A very special website about many influential and inspirational heroes of the African-American experience is under development by a group called The History Makers. Their site, which is still under construction, promises to be a significant multi-media presentation. It is modeled upon a "holocaust experience" or "shoat" website, relating to the Jewish experience in Europe during the Second World War ... (and I am trying to get information on that website, as well!). Here is the URL for The History Makers:  http://www.thehistorymakers.com/

• Recent Academic Year SMILE write-ups have been placed on the SMILE home page. Check them out at the URL http://www.iit.edu/~smile. The write-ups are being put up first on my home page, http://www.iit.edu/~johnsonp, and then transferred over to the SMILE home page.

1. Making a "Rippling Rainbow":
   What will happen if you drop 10 drops of red food coloring into a jar of H₂0? Watch the diffusion of food coloring throughout the liqud.
2. Place 2 cups of uncooked rice into a quart jar, and put in a large marble (or ping-pong ball). After putting the marble in, put on the lid and turn upside down. The marble will be at the bottom. Give the jar a few vertical shakes, and note the marble comes to the top of the jar. Why?? As you shake the jar, the rice will fill in the spaces. The marble is too large to do this, so that it will work its way to the top. Question: Is this why the large cashew nuts are at the top of the box when you open it, even they are also the most dense of nuts? Amazing!

Marie Wong (Warren School; First Grade)
Guessing the number of jelly beans in the bag: The actual number was 355, and the closest guess was 350. [How, other than by pure luck, can you get this close?] Do this exercise with a class, and list the guesses in order from the least to the greatest, to study their distribution.

In the second activity each person was given a bag of jelly beans. First they estimated the total number of beans, as well as the number of beans of each color. Then, the beans were sorted by colors and counted. Next, a graph of estimated and actual numbers were plotted for each color and for the total [bar graphs]. Finally, everybody gets to eat the beans. All five senses are thus brought into this exercise. Delicious!

Ernest Garrison (Jones Commercial HS)
Polymers, continued He mixed chemicals obtained from Flinn Scientific to make a type of "polyurethane foam". He added one teaspoon of a monomer foam called Part A to one teaspoon of the other monomer foam called Part B, and then stirred the mixture for a few minutes. The resultant "compound??"expanded, gave off heat, and in its final form it felt firm, resembling styrofoam. Check the website for Flinn Scientific: http://www.flinnsci.com/.

Cynthia Southern (Spencer School; Kindergarten)
She showed a picture of Michael Jordan's hand, and had us estimate how many great northern white beams it would require to cover that hand. Then, we placed the beans on his hand, and we compared our estimates with the number required, which was about 120. Michael has big hands!

RaeLynn Schneider (Williams School)
Stored Energy

• Take two "stub" pencils and bind them firmly with a rubber band. Now twist them and let go. What happens?
• Windup Whirlygig Make a merry-go-round with one oatmeal box, decorated with spirals on the vertical surface, a plate centered and attached onto the top with a rubber band which goes through the box and is also held at the bottom. Attach paper horses to the plate with strings. While holding the box in place, rotate the plate to wind up the rubber band to store energy, as before, and then let the plate go. As the rubber band unwinds inside the merry-go-round turns.
  References:
  • Science Art Projects and Activities That Teach Science Concepts and Develop Process Skills, p 93-95, Deborah Schecter [1999 ISBN 059 - 089643 -1]
  • Hobby Fun Book for Grade School Boys and Girls, p 44, Margaret Hyde and Frances Keene [The Seahorse Press 1952]
• Cut the a wrist watches out of paper [12 watches in all --- one for every hour]. Laminate them by putting plastic packing tape on each side. Each watch is stylish, and gives the correct time twice daily! With a set of 12 such watches, you can display the correct hour. This "manipulative" is useful for teaching students to tell time!

Monica Seelman (St James School; Williams School)
Sister Monica demonstrated paper folding. We made a polyhedron [a solid with many faces, each of which is a plane polygon] with f =24 faces, e =36 edges, and v = 14 vertices [corners]. This count is consistent with Euler's theorem:

See you next time!

Pat Phillips (Arai Middle School)
Lesson on Probability (handout) It has been possible to get a Pokemon Card with a McDonald's Happy Meal. Let us say that there are 6 different kinds of cards, and that each is equally likely; i.e., each occurs with probability 1/6. How many Happy Meals must you order to get a full set of six cards? We did a Monte Carlo Simulation of the process, by putting two copies of each card [12 cards in all ] into a box, and drawing cards randomly from the box, recording the card name, and putting that card back each time. We were divided into groups for this process, and each group did three trials. Here are the data for one of the groups of number of "hits" for each card and "total number drawn" to get a full set of 6 cards:

This group averaged 10.3 draws in order to get a complete set of cards, whereas the other groups averaged 17.3, 18.0, and 11.0 draws, corresponding to a class average of about 14.2 draws. We were thus close to the average over many trials, which is said to be about 14.5 draws.

One may determine and discuss the mean, mode, and median of the trials. This exercise involves the application of notions of probability in our everyday lives, for such things as batting and shooting averages in sports, life insurance, quality control in industry, opinion polls, raffle tickets, etc. This activity is consistent with the NCTM [National Council of Mathematics Teachers] standards and the requirement to include "probability" in the teaching of mathematics. Also "math" is linked with "reading", as well as "sports", "politics" , and "consumerism".

Porter Johnson mentioned that such Monte Carlo Techniques are very frequently used in science and engineering to get good estimates on numbers that are too difficult to calculate by "brute force". The name was chosen based upon experiences by Stanislaw Ulam, a scientist on the Manhattan Project in World War II, who became severely ill just after the war, requiring several months of recuperation. He began to play the card game SOLITAIRE, and began to wonder what the odds of winning would be. He modified the usual rules to require that "every move that is not forbidden is compulsory", just like in the US Army, so that the outcome of each game would be determined merely by the order of the cards in the deck. The total number of different orderings of a deck with 52 cards is 52 factorial, = 52 !, or

The odds [which may be about 1/3 for the most liberal of rules] are "borderline impossible" to calculate, but you can play a few games to get a qualitative estimate of them, and if you play many, many games the estimate improves. Roughly speaking, with N trials, the accuracy is of order 1 /Ö N, so that, for example, in an "opinion poll" 625 people must be asked to get 4 % accuracy, since

Val Williams, Jr (Perkins Bass School, Band Instructor)
Science through Music How do the various types of music affect our central nervous system? We know that music has a profound effect upon our emotions [music soothes the savage breast; or is it "beast" ], and there is some evidence and a popular consensus that you "think better" with the right background music. That is, babies who listen to Mozart and such learn to talk more quickly, etc.

How do we test this hypothesis? He developed a modest experiment, based upon the battery-operated board game Operation: Skill Game. While wearing earphones, his trusty assistant Jeremiah played the game. Over one minute intervals we recorded

• A: Number of Successes the number of times he picked up an icon;
• B: Number of Failures the number of times he set off the buzzer;

One might be tempted to conclude the following:

• Jeremiah needs music to get going.
• "Rhythm" makes him both faster and more careless.
• "Soul" makes him more careless but not faster.
• Classical music makes him slow and careful.
• Functions well in a "rap" environment.

Next, Val gave the following mantra for good teaching---it should be all of these things:

• GRAPHIC
• SAFE
• SIMPLE
• RELEVANT
• FUN

Estelvenia Sanders (Jones Commercial HS)
Science in Sign: Part XVIII
She gave us signs for the following things:

First, she did several experiments with water:

Next she asked why a solidly frozen plastic water bottle took all day to melt, if then. Points to consider:

• It takes 80 calories of heat to melt one gram of ice.
• The plastic container is not a good conductor or absorber of heat.
• If you don't put it on the radiator or in the sun, it absorbs less heat.
• You don't drink it fast enough!

Barbara Pawela (SMILE Staff Member; CPS Retired)
The Clanging Soda Pop Cans (handout) to illustrate Bernoulli's Principle.
Take two empty soda pop cans and lay out about two dozen drinking straws in parallel [like railroad cross-ties] on a level table.

• Put the empty cans [straight up] on top of the straws, with the edges about 2 cm apart. Blow [horizontally] between the cans, and notice that the cans move together. Why?? The Bernoulli Principle is at work.
• Now, put the cans on the straws about 5 cm apart. Again, blow. You have to blow much harder to get the cans to move together.

See You next time!

                                Future Meetings

          Apr 25    A       Sophia Watson        Sophia Watson
                            Virginia O'Brien
                            Iona Greenfield      Claudette Rogers
                            Virginia O'Brien     ___________________
                            Iona Greenfield      ___________________

                    B       Brian Cagle          Brian Cagle
                            Pearline Scott       Pearline Scott
                            Kim Baker            Kim Baker
                            __________________   ___________________

          May  8    A       Barbara Baker        Barbara Baker
                            Chandra Price        Chandra Price
                            __________________   ___________________
                            __________________   ___________________

                    B       Brian Cagle          ___________________
                            Mikhail Siddiq       ___________________
                            __________________   ___________________
                            __________________   ___________________