Little Scientists...

We uploaded the information children collected during the night at their houses. Only half of them recorded information, the other had problems… broken sensors, sensor connected in the wrong position, dead batteries. The ones that collected data were able to graph and explain what happened. They also discussed the difference between the two data sets. They can tell already how the sensors worked from the exercises we did yesterday. I told them about a temperature investigation I did at my house… I told them about how the house’s temperature stays stable in winter, even though the temperature outside changes. We actually discussed how different the temperature behaves there (big changes over a short period of time) and how the houses are built to keep temperatures.

Children form groups and worked on projects. The idea was to investigate different things. We met with the children to make sure they had good questions and designed a good experiment. It was great to see them create and investigate. They actually spent the whole day on this activity. We made a lot of emphasis on the design (what, where and how long do you measure in order to answer the question they had).

Some of them wanted to find out if the temperature in the classroom was different from the kindergarten room because of the room size and the number of people. Another group wanted to find out about the noise in the different environments over the day: classroom, dinning room and patio.

Another group wanted to measure the size of the school building. They were actually disappointed about their experiment at first because they did not have any data to graph. We had a long discussion about different ways they could look at their project and information. They ended up comparing the size of all the building at the school and comparing the percentage they each represent.

I am finishing another visit tomorrow. I will go back t Boston tomorrow. I will be working with the teacher and the children over distance. They have email and videoconferencing capabilities… we are looking forward to meet on cyberspace.