Today, in our #lockdownwithkids chronicle, we will be enjoying our coffee break together while mixing thermodynamics and music. Welcome to the Breakfast Club!
Sugar crystals - The beauty of supersaturated solutions
Rock candy or sugar candy also called rock sugar, is a type of confection composed of relatively large sugar crystals. This candy is formed by allowing a supersaturated solution of sugar and water to crystallize onto a surface suitable for crystal nucleation, such as a string, stick, or plain granulated sugar. Heating the water before adding the sugar allows more sugar to dissolve thus producing larger crystals.
Discover our resources below (simple click on the images) on Rock Candy, a perfect STEAM activity to be done with kids at home, providing them with creativity ...
and first steps of thermodynamics' understanding: "Increased temperature usually increases the solubility of solids in liquids. To understand why we need to return to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Increased temperature means a greater average velocity for the particles. This allows them to move from one position to another more easily. The greater freedom of movement allows the system to change its state more easily, and in keeping with the Second Law, it changes to the most probable state available, that is, the most dispersed state of which it is capable. Solids are condensed systems, so the dissolving of a solid usually leads to increased dispersal of the system." Learn more here
How cool is this!
Enrich your coffee and tea time experience with microcontrollers
As you have noticed since the launch of this chronicle, besides DIY activities with kids, we are also looking for discovering with you amusing and STEAM-based inspiring initiatives that can be replicated in schools or at home. In the field of enriching your breakfast experience, we are not lacking funny experiences based on microcontrollers, proving again that electronics can be exciting in all fields of STEAM education, including arts & music...
Mug Music: Turn Water Into an Instrument With microcontrollers and ChucK
Discover the amazing work of Bonnie Eisenman, a software engineer at Twitter, based in NYC developing projects with Arduino, musical programming, and lasers and her repository for teachers and individuals to turn water into music here.
TeaBot - a Tea Making Robot Made Using microcontrollers
What about Making a TeaRobot using an Adafruit Motor Shield stacked on the top of an Arduino UNO. How inspired and inspiring! Discover the project here!
Do not hesitate to share with us your own work and ideas!
How to make the perfect coffee! What if ... Science can help! AMAZING!
Not all coffee cups are created equal in terms of materials and how those materials affect energy transfer. By using a waterproof temperature sensor, we are able to track temperature changes in various kinds of coffee cups ... The objective: Who will guess which cup keeps the coffee hottest for the longest period of time? Here is a great activity to be organized within your classroom, in line with thermodynamics laws ... (Is there a common theme here right?)
To go further - Scientist of the Day
Definitely a common theme, discover today with us Richard Phillips Feynman, an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the patron model.