Tuesday, April 26, 2011

2011 AES Science Fair!

by HouseBoy

Audrey and Evan both participated in the elementary school's Science Fair this year. The Fair is sponsored by Lockheed and is in the memory of one of the mom's from Evan's Cub Scout pack who passed away unexpectedly last fall. 
The fair had over 180 participants and over 100 elementary school science projects.
Audrey worked on a project with her friend Emma.  The project included research on food groups, and healthy eating and involved collected and analyzing data on people's eating preferences. At the fair, the girls had people do a taste test using 2 recipes for banana bread - one made with butter the other with apple sauce. This was correlated with the healthy eating habits survey.
The results were inconclusive, but the girls had fun and learned a lot about the foods we choose to eat. The also learned about the difficulty of writing and completing a survey.
Evan chose water as the focus of his project. He researched facts about water and decided to try two experiments.
One to demonstrate water pressure and one to illustrate water surface tension. For water pressure, he used a large container that we cut 3 holes in, each deeper than the other. When the container was filled with water, it proved the presence of increased water pressure at the bottom of the container (the water jetted out of the hole much farther than the top hole).  Water surface tension used a small plastic boat and a tray of water and a drop of dish washing liquid. Both tests were a success and he learned some unique facts about water, and conservation. We learned that still, in 2011, 1.5 Billion people are without access to clean water each and every day.

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