On 11/05/2018 07:23, jimlux wrote:
On 5/10/18 9:55 PM, Hal Murray wrote:

A few months ago, I was a judge for the county level middle school science
fair.  (I'm not very good at what they wanted, but that's a different
problem.)

What sort of interesting time related experiments can a middle school geek do?

Borrowing serious gear may not be off scale as long as a youngster can run it.


The whole area of celestial nav is time related and uses very simple equipment -

Telling time by measuring the sun in some way.  Occultation of stars by the moon.  Positions of jupiter's big 4 moons.

Pendulum experiments.  If the student has a way to change their altitude, can they measure changes in g.  Driving a pendulum.

Coupled resonators  (spring/mass, pendulum, vibrating rods)

Measuring the speed of light (Fizeau or Michelson method? Other ways)

Water clock, sand hour glass, etc.  Measuring performance variation over environmental variations.


the trick with good science projects is finding something that's not just a "lab demo" - where there's some engineering component to figuring out how to execute the demo with unusual or improvised equipment, or where you're measuring something that's not been done before.
The advice that we got when doing a middle school science project was that you wanted an experiment with only one variable (altitude or temperature etc) and a  measurement of a single variable (maybe over time).

Philip





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