science tuesday :: learning from failure

I am the chief educator in our family. We often joke that Mr WAH is more of a headmaster, not actually teaching but overseeing from a distance.

Sometimes though, he does get involved, and normally it is on an epic scale. Not for him the world of worksheets and text books. For fun (!) Mr Wah is working on the Google Lunar X Prize in his spare time. This probably explains a lot about us as a family...but that's for another day.

The kids are bemused by this, as they live in a digital generation where if you want to see lunar images, you simply type this into a search engine and hey presto! Images.

Mr Wah wanted to get the kids to appreciate the effort that goes into obtaining these images, the science, the creative thinking and the technology.

He decided that the best way to do this was to actively involve them. We started simple, with trying to work out how we would get images from the sky when we don't have a satellite or a rocket.

This is what they came up with:

That's their Dads cycle helmet camera (an odd gift from the in-laws) tied with fishing wire to a paper lantern. It looked promising to start with, and the kids saw how hot air rises, and that the paper lantern did not produce enough hot air to carry the weight of the camera.


So they went back to the drawing board, and decided that what they really needed was several helium balloons, good weather, some packaging around the camera to protect it, a large field and a tracking device. They submitted a financing request to the budget holders (Me and Mr Wah) and next month we will revisit this experiment with the necessary equipment to see if we can get images in this way.


From this experiment the kids learnt:

• The differences between hot and cold air
• The importance of research
• What wind is
• That failure can be valuable learning experience
  

If you want to make your own hot air balloon, instructions here, or you can buy them from here. Please be careful - if you set fire to the washing or your house, or indeed, each other, I will not assume any kind of responsibility!