Indy in our classroom!

Quelle belle journee!  What a beautiful day!  Sometimes I love my job so much I think I may vibrate out of my skin.  Today was definitely one of those days.  We have been learning about simple machines and building devices that move and the kids worked so hard on their Angry Birds projects.  Today was like the cherry on top of the awesome cake.  Our class was lucky enough to have a very special guest speaker all the way from Indianapolis, USA.  

Thanks to Mr. Livingston from CanTorque (Edmonton) and the Tagliani Autosport team we were able to Skype a real Indy 500 race car LIVE into our classroom! FROM THE ACTUAL INDY 500!!

First he showed us a bit of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (which we had looked up on Google Earth - WOW!  Yes, that is a golf course in the middle of the track.)

Then when the crew was ready we were able to see the driver, the talented (and Canadian!) Alex Tagliani, take off for a practice run.  VROOOOM!!!   It. Was. Awesome!!!!!!!!  The kids cheered!!

The noise was so intense our technology couldn't handle it and we lost audio.  We noticed flashes of colour dance across the screen and soon realized that it was the Indy cars zooming by so fast we could hardly see them.  Mr Livingston said they can reach speeds of up to 235MPH, about 400KM!  He added "They will pull 5-6 g's going through the corner. So a 150lb driver will fee like they weigh 900 lbs!"

He was gracious enough to answer some of the kids questions:
How long does it take to get around the track?  How long is the real race?
About 50 seconds and the track is 2.5 miles. Race will take about 3 hours. Very very hard on the body and lots of fluid loss.  The driver will lose 8-10 lbs during the race
How much does the car weigh?  Have you ever been able to drive an Indy car?
The car weighs about 1600 lbs. Sorry for the imperial but in the U.S. It's all we have!
No, you can't drive them. They are very rigorous with the engines, can't do anything without a representative from the factory. I have driven a formula Atlantic car which is a step below these. Great questions guys!
What do you like best about racing?  What's your favorite race car?
I love competition! It's also really fun to drive very fast without worrying about getting a speeding ticket.  
Fav race car, great question! I'd have to say our NASCAR Canadian Tire car that we run across Canada! I really love watching these Indy cars but prefer when they run on road and street courses. I like right and left hand turns

This is their NASCAR - SO COOL!!!

This weekend's Indy 500 big race on Sunday at 10:15am our time.  See a live stream of the track all weekend HERE.

Alex Tagliani also supports allergy awareness through his fantastic sponsors, EpiPen and one of their initiatives is the Summer of Tag or Ete de Tag.  It is a great contest I am going to promote in our school because it helps to acknowledge our Allergy Heroes.  See more details on the above links or click on the image below.

As part of my pre-teaching lesson for today we looked up Alex Tagliani as well as the science of Indy and found some great videos.  You're welcome.

Angry Birds and Race Cars!

We have finally finished our grade 4 science Rovio Angry Birds project for the "building things that move" unit.  It was amazing to watch them problem solve as they battled physics and their own frustrations to get their cars moving.  Design after design, prototype after prototype they all kept going.  See HERE for a previous post about the science of motion and our research stage.  We learnt a lot about friction, potential and mechanical energy, and everything it takes to get an object to move on it's own.  I am pretty proud of my wee engineers.

Teachers if you want to do this project with your class in English or EN FRANCAIS just click on this link.  It includes the student workbook, teacher guide, and even paper 3D Angry Birds!

Come and see the bulletin board I made to show off our work!  (Not bad for a junior high teacher!)

What about seeing a real race car? There is a lot of science that we could learn from CanTorque.  We shall see...

  

Gravity and rotation

Today we learnt all about centrifugal force, center of gravity and stability through rotation.  Here are some great videos and things to try!

For teachers click HERE to download some activities to go along with this as well as the template for balancing the letters (p.11) and the provinces of Canada.

What is center of mass?

Other demos

• Balancing letters
• Gyroscope
• Balancing cowboy

Balancing objects (to try at home)

Gyroscope

Movies

Hand balancing - Kristef Brothers (A little cheeky)

Stabilization through rotation and center of gravity

DANCE OFF!!

Chris Hadfield

I have been following Commander Chris Hadfield and his adventures both on, and off, of the International Space Station for months. It has been so amazing to see space and our world through his eyes. He shares pictures of the Earth, videos on science and life in micro-gravity aboard the ISS, and his own brand of colourful music. He is my new hero! Wouldn't it be great to Skype with him or have him come to our school??!! Something for next year!

















See some of the most amazing posts!

Twitter
Facebook
His CSA biography
Canadian Space Agency - CSA
YouTube
    -  CSA 
    -  NASA 
ISS on UStream
    -  CSA 
    -  NASA  

                                   

http://topnews.net.nz/content/226223-winipeg-students-talk-chris-hadfield-while-he-floats-space 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ISS-34_Chris_Hadfield_juggles_some_tomatoes.jpg

Destroying Marshmallows

We did a lab this week where you draw a grid on a marshmallow and then apply the forces we learnt about in class:  compression, tension, shearing, flexion and torsion.  Then we record how the grid changes.  After we were done we all had a clean marshmallow to enjoy.  See more here http://www.technologystudent.com/forcmom/force1.htm

Great demos

I found this YouTube Chanel made by a homeschooling parent with great videos to demo just about anything you can think of.  We will be using this soon!

http://www.youtube.com/TheBasementWorkshop