Besides the usual bathroom cleaning, I dedicated much of today to Science! I finished writing that 100 Proofs article I’ve been mentioning.
And I planned out what I’ll be doing with the school children on my next STEM Professionals in Schools visit on Monday. I wanted to do a Q&A session with all the classes, because it’s minimal preparation for me, but my contact said the kindergarten and Year 1 teachers requested me to do a presentation, because their kids are too young to be able to come up with sensible and meaningful questions. [It’s true – last time they got fixated on asking me “how many X are there?”, for X=(cats, animals, fish, bones, trees, etc).] SO I went through my old slides and found one I did on dinosaurs 5 years ago – so none of the younger kids will have seen that one. I refreshed myself on what was in the slides so I can talk about it on Monday.
And for Science Club I planned a new experiment. We’re going to make pH indicator using red cabbage, and then test various household chemicals. The usual suspects like lemon juice, vinegar, baking soda, etc. Which meant I had to draw up a shopping list. I’ll have to go shopping tomorrow for everything I need.
Oh, and I spent a bunch of time making tomorrow night’s Darths & Droids strip, following the writing session yesterday.
And now, it’s late… time for bed!
New content today:
xcld does approximations of big numbers – it’s nice, but probably not suitable for kindergarden. it’s interesting trying to estimate how many X are there. animals are easier – if they are endangered, their numbers are on record – but that’s probably less interesting to talk about – unless you want to demonstrate how some species are almost extinct while others are doing fine in the human world.