I am interested in science and science education, and I firmly believe that a great way for kids to learn science is to give them the chance to do it themselves. There are a gazillion fun, easy science experiments your kids can do at home using everyday household items! My goal with this series is to show you, dear readers and dear podcast listeners, how to do a few, so maybe you can try them with your kids!

There are several different types of gooey science that you can make, and people call each by different names. The one we will make today is what I call oobleck, but many people call it goo, glop or quicksand goo, and it is basically cornstarch and water. (Not to be confused with silly putty or slime, which are both polymers.)

Oobleck gets its name from a Dr. Seuss book called “Bartholomew and the Oobleck“, in which the King of Didd decides he’s bored with the regular weather, so he asks his magicians to make something different. Unfortunately, what then falls from the sky is ooey, gloppy oobleck, which turns out to be the kingdom’s largest environmental disaster ever. The king asks for advice, and Bartholomew solves the crises by suggesting the king admit he made a mistake in thinking he needed to use magic to improve on nature, and to say he was sorry. This happily causes the oobleck to melt away. So, while we wait for the CEO of a certain oil company to apologize, we can make our own oobleck!

Required supplies:

Corn starch
Water
Measuring cups
Spoons or popsicle sticks to stir with
Cups or bowls
Ziplock bag or airtight container for storage

How to:

Use two parts corn starch to one part water, for example 1/2 cup of cornstarch and 1/4 cup of water.
You can add a drop or two of food coloring, if desired.
Stir until all the powder is incorporated. If the ratio is right, it is hard to stir, but flows together when you stop stirring. Small children may need help with stirring.

To observe:

With gentle treatment, oobleck acts like a liquid.
With harsh treatment, oobleck acts like a solid.
For example, if you slowly push your finger down into the oobleck, the fluid will behave like a liquid and allow your finger to enter. However, if you quickly poke the oobleck with your finger, your finger will bounce off the surface, like a solid. Also, you can quickly roll a small amount into a ball and hold it in your fingers for a moment, before it begins to run and drip.

What’s happening:

Oobleck is what is called a non-Newtonian fluid. Non-Newtonian fluids act very strangely because they do not have a constant coefficient of viscosity. Regular fluids have a constant viscosity. Viscosity is the measure of how easily a fluid flows. For example, water has a low viscosity and flows easily, whereas maple syrup has a higher viscosity, and flows less readily. Oobleck’s viscosity changes depending on what you do to it. If you apply a force to it very quickly (poke it), its viscosity increases, and it resists flow, and seems solid. If you treat it more gently, and apply smaller forces over longer amounts of time (push finger in slowly), it flows more easily. Weird!

Clean up and Storage

Oobleck cleans up easily with a damp cloth and water. It is super messy on little hands, so we limit it to the kitchen table. You can store it for a few days in an airtight container in the refrigerator to prevent mold.

For even more cornstarch fun, check out Steve Spangler’s website, where his son Jack explains how to make cornstarch monsters (shapes that dance and jump around) using oobleck and an old stereo!

The strange properties of oobleck were ridiculously demonstrated using 1000 pounds of cornstarch by the Mythbusters. Don’t try this at home!!

Until now!! The nation’s inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival is coming to Washington, DC, this fall. Picture this: on October 23 and 24, the National Mall will be covered with booths sponsored by over 500 science and engineering corporations, and each will feature a fun, hands-on, science activity for kids.

(I’m such a nerd, this sounds so freaking awesome to me!)

I’m posting about this now to give you plenty of time to plan your vacations. If a trip to DC isn’t in the cards for you, they are planning to have many satellite events. Perhaps one will occur near you, or better yet, you could host one!

I’m really hoping my family can swing a quick trip to DC that weekend, since I am so crazy for science education. Besides, my musician friend Monty Harper is hosting a booth focusing on science music for kids, and we don’t want to miss it!

Another reason to go? They call themselves the “Woodstock of Science”!

Astronomers have been making an effort to rebuild the connection — especially for kids — that these gorgeous astronomy pictures you see on the Internet are just more detailed images of things that you can see yourself with your own eyes. During the “100 Hours of Astronomy” (which I wrote about here), my kids and I got to see Saturn through a telescope for the first time! And, let me tell you, it’s an exciting experience to look at a dot of light in the sky, learn that it’s actually Saturn, and then see with your own eyes (through a telescope) that it really has rings, just like the pictures! Ditto for seeing the details of the moon (which we also saw that day), and seeing the moons and surface stripes of Jupiter (which we saw at a recent public observing at Princeton University)!!

But what about kids and parents who aren’t aware of such opportunities? Who might be inspired by seeing the planets through a telescope, but just haven’t thought of it? Well, that’s where Halloween comes in!!

Richard Wade of Friendly Atheist had a great idea!

He happens to have some fairly serious telescopes, and realized that Halloween was the perfect opportunity to share them with the neighborhood! It’s autumn (when the weather’s still warm, but it gets dark early), and kids teens and parents are out in a celebratory mood, ready to socialize with all the neighbors! It couldn’t be more perfect!

His wizard costume is part of his effort to make this telescope-viewing blend into the rest of the holiday celebration, but really I think it’s just because it’s fun to have an excuse to dress up as a wizard. And he reports that the kids, parents, and even teens really enjoy the opportunity! And don’t worry — he also passes out treats. The view of Jupiter is in addition to Halloween treats, not instead of (unlike the anti-Halloweeners who pass out Bible tracts).

What a fun idea! It makes me wish I had a telescope (well, and a yard…) so I could do the same! I hope the idea catches on, and other serious Astronomy hobbyists who have real telescopes will start doing this too!!

A large bell, canon, or gong is sounded and the all the guests cheer: “Chigee Chigge Chee! Hize Hize Hize! [child's name] is now immunized!”

A good time is had by all.

OK, are you back? I would like to add to his post that most children (should) get a round of shots at the age of 11-12, which include the Tdap (Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis) and the MCV4 (Meningococcal) vaccines. I suggest this could be a chance for parents to celebrate their child’s impending teen years. A child’s “Tweenitiation” is a time for parents to sit down with their child and explain that they will soon change from the sweet, happy child of their past into a moody, gangly, pimply mound of hormones. But it is important for the child to understand that, while this happens after the vaccination is administered, it is not caused by the vaccination. This is a great opportunity to teach children about the difference between correlation and causation! Perfect gifts for a child at his/her Tweenitiation include “The Demon-Haunted World”, “Why People Believe Weird Things”, and “Flim-Flam!”.

Planets and their cores, by Nico, age 7

In addition to all of the obvious things you’d expect from a painting program (lines, shapes, fills, text, etc.), Tux Paint comes with a library of “stamps”, which are images that kids can place in the drawing and manipulate by changing the size, orientation, and often the color. The stamps don’t take over the job of drawing, though, if you use your imagination to fit them into your drawing, as with the flame and lightning stamps in this picture of a volcano:

Volcano, by Nico, age 7

And, for added entertainment, many of the stamp have sound effects that play when when you place the stamp in your drawing. I’ll admit that my kids got a lot of laughs out of the picture of a toilet, which flushes every time you place it in your drawing.

African savanna, by Léo, age 5

The other effects are even more fun, such as tools to color fields of grass, or grow flowers, or construct brick walls. The kids also love the tools to create strange distortions such as ripple effects or turning the colors to their negatives. I have to admit, I had so much fun playing with this program with them, that I used it myself when illustrating a post about weird dreams:

Dream house balcony, by Mommy, age 37 (Léo helped)

The user interface is so simple and intuitive that the kids had no difficulty figuring out on their own exactly what they could do. The one-click undo/redo buttons are especially appreciated — no more tears over making a mistake that ruins the drawing!

Plus, it’s eco-friendly: When I look at the size of their “saved drawings” folder, I hate to imagine how many trees would have been killed if they’d done them all on paper…

This is not a paid advertisement, by the way — just a recommendation from a satisfied customer. And the best part is that you can download it absolutely free! (For Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and more.)

Friday night I got to see the rings of Saturn with my own eyes for the first time. OK, so the light was bent a little by some mirrors and lenses, but it’s still cool that your can see a speck of light in the sky, and if someone points a big enough telescope at it, you can see that it really does have rings, just like in all the pictures! And that’s not all.

In addition to setting up telescopes in town (and letting people look through them!), the local polytechnic institute (ETH) has set up an exhibit (like a temporary astronomy museum) explaining astronomy and astrophysics. You can learn about how stars and nebulas are formed, about the composition of the universe (how dark matter and dark energy compares to the stuff we can see), and about the instruments people use to study the cosmos.

This is especially fun for my son Nico, who has gotten really interested in astronomy through books and the Internet. The funny thing is that he can tell you the relative sizes of Rigel and Sirius, but we hadn’t taken the time to take him outside at night and show him that you can look up in the sky and see those very stars with your own eyes. Now we’re changing that.

This “100 hours of astronomy” is such a cool effort since — with all of the ubiquitious outdoor lighting these days — people today don’t see the stars as much as earlier generations did, and most of us don’t really understand what we’re missing. I keep thinking of the description by a friend of mine of the sky in Mongolia, far from cities and buildings:

Those nights were extraordinary. Hundreds of kilometers from the nearest population center, our galaxy came alive each night. It was impossible to walk around camp without the Milky Way catching my eye and drawing my gaze upward. This was mid-August, and the Perseid meteor showers were adorning the sky with their own celestial fireworks. It was heady stuff.

I wish I could see that. But if you don’t have the opportunity to travel across Mongolia, at least you can go out tonight and an astonomer will show you the craters on the moon!

1. Make a snowball.
2. Throw the snowball so hard that is leaves the Earth’s atmosphere and orbits the Sun!

And here’s the variant suggested by his little brother Léo, age 5:

1. A comet is a dirty snowball, so find some very dirty snow to make a snowball.
2. Go on a spaceship to the Oort cloud
3. Open the door of the spaceship and put the snowball with the other comets.

Note: I’d never even heard of the “Oort Cloud” until these kids started watching astronomy videos on YouTube. I thought they were saying “Earth Cloud” until it looked it up on Wikipedia…