Friday, March 05, 2004

A Trip to the Science Fair

If you have a young friend or relative of a certain age, you know that lately it’s been science fair season. I suspect that sales of poster board and white glue and construction paper have sky-rocketed; parents have been fretting over how much or how little help to give their scientists; extended families have dutifully attended public sessions and oohed and ahhed over what the area’s future Nobel laureates have been working on.

I took a tour of some fourth grade science projects, and I’m here to report that the quality has gone up considerably since my day. Back in fourth grade I essentially handed in a copy of a drawing from the encyclopedia with arrows showing how wind moves across the wing of an airplane. Last week at our local school I saw kids asking research questions and framing hypotheses, running their own experiments, working up tables of data, and coming to conclusions that they boldly printed out and pasted up for anyone to see. They should have been proud.

Like all good science, the projects revealed the interests and obsessions of the minds that created them. One young scholar soaked a baby tooth in Coca-Cola for a few days and turned the cute little thing a nasty shade of brown. Another tested which brand of kitty litter would absorb the most liquid. One researcher used a maze to check out whether the family hamster preferred sunflower seeds or dried corn. Rumor has it that the hamster himself made a secret journey to school to re-enact his maze work, to the delight of classmates and the surprise of the teacher.

Some projects drew responses more personal than scientific from our fourth grader. She pointed out one that tested whether ten cats would rather watch a video made for cats or a more generic animal-oriented feature. It turned out the cats liked the movie that was made for cats. My daughter breezed past that perhaps predictable conclusion to wonder keenly where all the cats came from. Seeing a project that tested how well a bucket of concrete cured in freezing temperatures, our scientist said, “I hope she didn’t drop it on her toe.” And because she herself had kept track of the growth of bread mold, she looked with great interest at the work of a young colleague who studied mold on two pieces of bread – one kept in darkness, the other one in light.

And it’s true that for a period of two weeks we had bread, in baggies, molding or refusing to mold in all corners of our house, under every kind of condition. There was bread with its normal moistness, bread dampened with extra water, bread dried in the toaster; there was bread in sunlight and in room light and in darkness; there was bread near the warm heater vent, bread at room temperature, and bread in the refrigerator; there was bread that had been handled with tongs, bread that had been touched, and bread the scientist had breathed upon; there was bread tightly wrapped and loosely wrapped and not wrapped at all; there was bread everywhere you looked. But most important of all, it turned out, everywhere she put bread, she put two slices, one slice with and one slice without preservatives.

Every afternoon she made readings, keeping track of the condition of all thirty slices of bread. At first, the days ticked by with no change in the condition of the bread. The damp bread stayed damp, the dry bread stayed dry, and no mold grew. Tension mounted around our house as the scientist began to wonder whether her experiment would be a flop. I felt like a Transylvanian lab assistant watching Dr. Frankenstein struggling in his lab. And finally, on the fifth day, some very exciting specks of blue-green mold, with a white fuzzy border, appeared on several of the preservative-free slices. By the ninth day, only one slice of bread with preservative had any mold at all, and things stayed that way until the end, while mold crept disgustingly over whole slices of the chemical-free bread. Our researcher concluded that mold likes to live on untreated bread that is warm and moist. And even though she was pleased to win a ribbon at the fair, for her the highlight of the experiment was probably the Frankensteinian moment on the fifth day when at last she created life. 

Broadcast by Ken Smith on March 05, 2004
Education • Family & Friends • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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