ScienceMan!

To introduce (or review) the concept of average speed for physics students, there’s nothing more fun than measuring the speed of toy cars! Students are provided with a selection of toy cars and then asked to assess average speed of the vehicle. I highly recommend buying a few toys from your nearby “dollar store” – these toys often have strange behaviours and idiosyncrasies that make the task just a little more challenging! Students are allowed to use any technique they…

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Ever wonder what’s inside a dry cell? Apologies to the Energizer bunny, but here is a cell that has been chopped in half; The parts are a little different from the old zinc-carbon cells; A – combination zinc powder/alkaline electrolyte paste where electrons are released (anode). B – brass conducting rod where the released electrons are collected. C – hard to see in the above diagram, but this is a fabric that separates anode from cathode. D – mixture of…

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It’s always a fun activity to dissect owl pellets – if you’ve never done it before, you really should give it a try, you can learn a lot about owls and what they eat. Here’s a few pictures from a ScienceMan grade 7 owl pellet lab: As long as you are using owl pellets from biological supply companies, this activity is perfectly safe – the owl pellets are fumigated so as to eliminate any chance of disease. The pellets are…

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