Greenwood Elementary's UW Engineering Expo Trip!

Friday, April 15, 2011

interview

Question1. What did you like? The body connections room

Question2. Why did you like it? The missiles

Question3 How long did you stay at 1 place? 15 minutes

Question4 how did you like the trip? It was really fun.

Question5 did you get to see Bucky the badger? No

Question6 If you were at the school at the expo would you want to be Bucky? No

Question7 what would you do if you were at the college? Be in the body connections room

Question8 how would you feel if you were at that college? Cool

Question9 How would you feel if you were Bucky? Stuck in a suit

Question10 Did you see any of the 8 buckys? no

Maeve s.

I went on a field trip to Madison to an Expo. I saw the wonder of physics. I thought that it was cool when the lady took a glass of water and put it on a plate with strings attached to it and swung it in a circle upside down and it didn’t spill. Then she showed us liquid nitrogen and she did a lot of things with it. First she told us how the fog formed. Next she poured water in it and the water froze, but the nitrogen was boiling because it is so cold and the and the air is really hot compared to the nitrogen. Next she took a little bit of the nitrogen and put it in a small like cannon made of copper she pounded the cap of cork in with a hammer and after like 20 seconds it would blow the cover off and hit the ceiling really hard. Jessica

What I learned at the Expo

I saw a sand castle station at the expo. The lady who was doing this experiment found out how the sand castles were formed. The sand forms a sand castle by absorbing the water and forms into a mold, but if you add soap to the sand and water, the soap will break the water’s surface tension, which makes the sand not absorb the water as well. Then we tried to make a sand castle with the water to see if it didn’t work, and it fell apart. Then the lady asked us to make a ball to see if it would form easier that way, but when my group set them down, they fell apart and went down the sides of the table.

Then we saw college students who made a project at the end of the semester instead of having a test. They did the project on medical things. The girl who was there explained how doctors sometimes have the problem of not knowing when to stop when they are drilling into a bone, and sometimes they accidently go too far and go into muscle or tissue, so she made a drill, that had a stopper on the end so the drill could only go through the bone not any farther, because they had a medal tube in the place where the drill bit was supposed to go, and they inserted the drill bit, which was smaller than the tube, and explained how it worked. It would stop at a certain point because at the end of the drill bit, it was bigger than the medal tube, so it would stop. They did this on a bone that they made and it stopped once it was threw. The college student built it. Molly

Floating cement

They made cement canoes that actually float. The cement is really light and they had costars that floated so I bought two of them for $1. The reason they float is because they have little glass pockets in them that hold air and that is how they float. The canoe they made this year is blue on the outside and black on the inside. -Dylan

i liked the body connections room because they had the mustle relaxer that they strapped to rour ankles and it viborated untill you just fell. and then they had the connect viideogame charecter deziner that followed your joints by the light bouncig off of you to copy your movements. and they also had you run on a treadmill but they taped you on a high speed camra so you got to watch yourself in slow motion-tre

Tesla Coil

When I was at the expo, we went into this one room. It had this big machine called the Tessla coil. It’s an invention that was supposed to transmit electricity in the air, but instead it’s a good way to make lightening. The demonstrator turned off the lights and then turned it on. He said it was going to be a little loud and he was right. Purple lightening came from the machine. It was really cool.

non Intoning fluid

We saw a non Intoning Fluid and it was really gooey and it was hard and watery. We got to play in it and I got my hands stock. There were a lot of kids there so some of us didn’t get to play in it. It was gorse but fun and it dripped out of your hands.

Torie Opelt

Test of the Posting Station

In order to get the kid’s posts up on the blog the day after the trip, Mr. Briggs Set up a posting station in his room.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Issues with the Blog

Somewhere in Mauston we ran into technical problems. Mr. Briggs thinks it has something to do with lots of people sending posts at the same time and somehow overloading the system. but either way it was not very fun getting our access to the blog cut off as soon as we arrived at the UW.

Nanotubes

Carbon atoms are neat. you arrange them one way and you get pencil lead, arrange them another way and you get a diamond. the people at the UW learned to arrange them a different way to create nanotubes. they don’t yet know what they can do.

world’s largest speaker

designed and built by two students they used lots of really powerful magnets to make this speaker. one of the creators of the speaker explained how it worked while playing his bass.

Superconductors

Some students showed us superconductors, special materials that when made very cold with liquid nitrogen levitate in the presence of magnets. these leads to metals and trains that “float”

electric snowmobile

we saw a snowmobile that ran on rechargeable batteries. it looked like the batteries that we use everyday, just a lot more of them and all strung together.

concrete canoe

this is a canoe made of concrete, they use special air-filled glass beads instead of sand so the concrete is light and floats on the surface of the water. some of us bought coasters of the material they use.

Casting tin with a microwave

When you put metal into a microwave, it archs and makes heat. using a modified microwave we used that heat to melt tin and cast it into sand molds.

peacock feather

While we were there, there was an exhibit that talked about how a reflection of something isn’t the right color. We used a peacock feather and put drops of water on it and then rubbed it and the feather turned a different color. It was really cool.-kelly

hovercraft

In UW Madison, many kids saw this wonderful hovercraft. The hovercraft caught many of the kids’ eyes, and they enjoyed seeing it. The hovercraft was made out of 2 thick pieces of plywood, along with a tarp, and a plastic lid of some sort. The air in tarp, allowed the rider to be lifted off of the ground, which caused him to fall off. When they were finished riding the hovercraft, they stopped the blower, and took it out of the hole. This was a great site to see.

swat car

I think this swat car is really cool and it is fun to play on a dad there said to some boys and told them to tip it over i think they should let us go inside the swat car to see what it would be like to sit in a swat car and be in the army.Sophie S.

snowmobile

It was cool that they had snowmobiles that they built. And taught about them and how they work.

fountain

This fountain is activated when there is weight applied to panels on the other side of the street, and each panel activates a sprayer on the fountain.

racecar

I loved loved the racecar. It could get from 0-60 in three and a half seconds. It had a push button shifter because you had to know what gear you were in. They said the top speed was 120mph. I thought it was really interesting that that college can build this kind of stuff. It is really cool how you get a degree for building really cool things.

Polaris IQ electric snowmobile

This is a electric powered Polaris snowmobile the whole seat is rechargeable it is very cool and Wisconsin like to build a battery powered snowmobile because we love snowmobiling. And it is very eco friendly.

The Water Particle Course

On the UW Madison campus, many kids tried the water particle course. You were a water particle, and you had to get cleaned, by going through the course. You started out in the tent, and you either had to run backwards, skip, or do the crab walk to get around the barrels,and you had to go through the cleaner, to be cleaned, which was going through hula hoops, with a tarp over them. Then you had to make your way across foam stones, to get through the next cleaner. Then you had to walk over to this guy, and he asked you a question about water, and if you got it right, you had to spin around 5 or 6 times around a bat, and if you got it wrong, you had to spin around the bat 6 or 7 times. Kids got very dizzy, and then after that, you had to follow a yellow rope, and once you got over the rope, you had to throw a ball in the barrel. This course was one of the kids’ favorite.

Toilets

When you got into the Main Building their was a hallway When you got down the hallway you see a Kohler exhibit were you got to learn many ways to save water. One of the ways was to change an old Toilet to a new one, that way you could save around 39,000 gallons of water, enough for 3 people to drink in their lifetimes. Another one was that when you switch from your old Shower head to a new one it can save lots of energy. Many kids found this information interesting.

Carbonates

Right when you walked into the first building there was a project all about carbonates. We found out that they are made by actually stacking atoms together. We also, found out that when on a piece a carbonate actually looks like a tessellation. At, their station they had examples of what they look like. And, in case we had no idea what they were saying, they gave us pencils with a picture of carbonates on them.

Magic sand

I saw this experiment at the engineering expo today. It was this one type of sand that if you put water on it, the water wont absorb. That was my favorite project. They used the magic sand to help the oil; spill. I put the water on a peacock feather and it didn't absorb. That was what was so cool!