ASF Broad Elementary School: Science Fair! The Slideshow!

The ASF Broad Street Elementary School Science Fair was absolutely the best science fair ever. Some of our favorites included "Magnetic Money," "Penny Sauce," and "Does Dish Detergent Affect Plant Growth?"

Why Magnetic Money? It turns out there is magnetic ink involved in money. We were surprised to learn about this because a lot of people thought there were magnetic strips in the paper.

Penny Sauce: what will take the tarnish off pennies? Can hot sauce do it, and if so, which hot sauce ingredients will do this? These scientists did an excellent job of isolating the ingredients one by one to see if an individual agent would clean copper, or if it required a combination of ingredients to clean copper. The combination of tomato and salt won.

Will Dish Detergent Affect Plant Growth? Yes. Do not put soap on your plants unless it is in a mild solution to kill bad bugs.

Lyndsy, Sara, and Lanham enjoyed the ASF Broad Science Fair more than they imagined possible. Thank you to everyone at ASF Broad Elementary- students, teachers, and guest scientist judges!

Dawn Dish Detergent - the Scandal.

In investigating what happens to plants when you put dish detergent into their water, Jesus N and Lanham tried to find the ingredients for Dawn dish detergent. We found that if you go on the Dawn website, they say that every batch is different, then, they tell you to go to the website for Soap and Detergent Association and find out what is usually in a dish detergent.

Then we looked at that and it did not tell us anything helpful. Next we looked at the Material Data and Handling Sheet. It is true, we think, that Dawn has ingredients that are not safe.

Jesus and Richard, his science fair partner, took photographs of what happened to Plant A, which got only water, and Plant B, which got water mixed with Dawn. Plant B started leaning over, and started dying, and turned pink. Richard and Jesus' photographs of this will be at the ASF Broad Elementary School Science Fair tomorrow.

reported by Jesus N and Lanham

Science Fair FEVER

What can we expect at the upcoming Alan Shawn Feinstein Broad Street Elementary School Science Fair? Here's a photo from a science fair in Iowa, with everyone's privacy shielded. Unfortunately, everybody looks like a blockhead.

Our science fair at ASF Broad St Elementary is also an experiment, because it is the first time this school has had a science fair. The teachers for our 4th and 5th graders are working to make sure every student who participates will have a very clean organized presentation, with the title, hypothesis, problem, method, and findings (conclusion) clearly set out on a trifold board.

Some scientists will have photographs. Some will make use of graphs. Some scientists will find out that their project will prove what they set out to prove when they wrote their hypothesis. But some scientists, like Brenlee N, will have their hypothesis go CRAZZZY.

Brenlee and her partner put one plant in sunlight for 5 days, and one in a closet for 5 days. Neither plant got any water. While we know sunlight is like food for plants, it turns out the plant in the closet grew a lot and the one in the sunlight just sat there. Tomorrow we will look at how this could happen.

WPK Science Fair news!!!!!

As promised, here's the update on Danny and Damien's investigation into temperature and mass, which they're studying for the 4th to 5th grade Science Fair at ASF Broad Street Elementary, on Broad Street.

Danny and Damien used a simple set-up involving water, a baby food jar, a straw, clay, food coloring, and a freezer. They had read enough to think that water would expand when it was frozen. When they did the experiment, they could clearly see it happen, because the food coloring made everything blue and easy to see. What they found out was that the molecules behave differently at different temperatures. Danny and Damien wrote that water molecules aren't like flat boxes, and that water molecules stack up more flexibly and use less space when the molecules are warm. Then, when the same molecules are frozen, they get stiff, or rigid. That means the molecules can't fold themselves into smaller spaces, so they end up taking up more room.

This is a true and excellent job of describing the situation by Danny and Damien.

Next up: what happens to plants when you put dish detergent in their water?

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We were pleasantly surprised to find out that wisdom deliveries were possible in the 02905 zip code.