Gases are made of highly excited molecules. To teach this you can show students the Ideal Gas Law and the linear relationship between pressure, volume, and temperature.

pV =nRT 

You can tell them that the air molecules around us are racing at over a 1000mph.  The result is always the same. Their faces glaze over, we all swim through an ocean of gas every day and I guess a little familiarity breeds contempt. Therefore you need an experiment that takes gases from the ordinary to extraordinary.

Last week, I set about bringing the power of gases to life for the staff here at our Littleton office. What is the point of having a “science wiz” on staff if you do not get to see something cool once in a while?

So after roping off a large portion of our parking lot and with everything checked for safety, I took a gas that had been super-cooled into a liquid and poured it into a bottle and sealed it. I then quickly took my bottle and dropped it into a trash can for containment. Then we waited!

The molecules of the super-cooled gas were heated by the outside temperature and began speeding up as they went from minus 320 F to about 70 F.  As they heated up they gained energy and quickly started to expand.  The bottle they were sealed in stopped the expansion so the gas molecules started to push on the walls, rapidly increasing the pressure inside the bottle. At somewhere around 100 pounds per square inch, the bottle failed and the gas molecules rushed out at around 1000-mph. This blew away both my trash can and my audience. First there was the huge shockwave boom. It was the kind of noise that you feel in your chest rather than in your ear. Then with car alarms blaring we witnessed pieces of trash can falling back to Earth.

One member of my audience told me it was the coolest thing she had seen at work in 25 years. And I knew that everyone had learned a little something about the power of gases and would not be taken them for granted anytime soon.  

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”

As the Director of Online Solutions for Champions, a big part of my job is to stay in tune with all things technical, and the innovative trends happening on the internet and off. With that said, I’ve spend a good amount of time over the past few years immersed in the digitally social (or is it socially digital?) world of social networking. I’m a regular Twitter user, I try to blog with some regularity and I follow several great blogs pretty closely, and I’ve even reconnected with some old friends through Facebook.

The key to most of the social technologies lie in the end-users, who are generally groups of people with similar interests who need a space to gather, discuss, learn and share information about those interests. With that said, as I was recently evaluating some content for an online course we are planning to build, I realized just how much of just that eLearning has been doing for well over ten years now.

The electronic school provides a space for learners to gather and learn about/interact with/discuss what we would hope are topics of interest (although this might be more or less true depending on the course topic and the learners enrolled in said course:). Like a blog, the online course often allows the teacher or instructor to provide topic-relevant updates (often in the form of announcements or a lecture), and then allows the readers (in this case, students) an opportunity to comment on that information–either through discussion boards or even in chat rooms. There are places to submit user-generated content (”Drop-boxes” for turning in papers and other submissions–even pictures in an art course), complete with a feedback loop (the gradebook). There are even systems out there that provide wiki technologies that allow students and teachers shared responsibility in creating and editing discovered or gathered course information.

Although there are certainly pieces of social networking that aren’t very prevalent in the eClassroom–microblog (i.e. “Twitter”) technology is not yet a prevalent feature in most common Learning Management Systems, and there are certainly opportunities for tagging and searching to further develop as a tool for sorting learning information, it is kind of neat to think that students and educators were taking advantage of socially interactive technologies years before they became everyday household terms. Chalk one up for the teachers and learners.

Science has been a passion of mine ever science High School.  It is a passion that has served me well in another of my interests—cooking. There are very strong links between cooking and science; both involve measuring, testing, and experimentation.  The art of cooking is the management of physical and chemical reactions with a healthy dose of experimentation thrown in.  We have all found ourselves in the situation where we are missing that one ingredient needed to complete a recipe and have then decided to make a substitution, creating our own mini-experiment in the process.

Television Chief Alton Brown leveraged this kitchen science connection when he presented recipes in a new way on his extremely education television show.  Recently, I discovered that the science of cooking has been taken to a whole new level when I read a book called “What Einstein Told His Cook,” by Robert Wolke.  As both a professor of chemistry and a keen cook, Robert dives into the science of the kitchen with gusto.  From whether you should add salt or oil to boiling pasta water to the latest scientific research on juicing limes, he blends the science of cooking with funny anecdotes and explains concepts in easy-to-understand terms.  A lot of what we do in the kitchen is learned through experience, but as Robert shows it is all founded in really interesting science.

I often recommend cooking as an educational activity when parents ask me how to engage their children in science at home.  Getting the children involved in the process of cooking is a perfect way to encourage their natural curiosity while also helping them develop experimental technique.  Food after all, is very motivational.  From measuring a cup of sugar to melting chocolate, kitchen chemistry is a great way to introduce children to and promote the process of experimentation.  Do not underestimate the educational power of allowing a young child to dissolve sugar and salt in separate glasses of water and then having them taste it.  Careful measuring, watching batter turn into cake, or adding lemon juice to avocadoes to stop them from browning, this is all great science opportunities that can be a springboard to further learning.  Best of all, this is science that you can eat.

Andy Allan “The Science Wiz”